What an honor! Many thanks for the kind words, Michael!

Overall, our results suggest mothers have lower incentives & higher costs of job search.

As mothers search less, they progress slower on the labor market—which contributes to the child penalty.

This & more in our new WP with @arnaudphilippe.bsky.social
! (6/6)

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/opulo...

But reallocation comes at a cost…

We show mothers prefer to search at normal times: when a reform introduced school on Wednesday in France in 2014 (yes, we had no school on Wednesday!), they reacted by smoothing their search across days.

Smoothing seems to rise applications’ success rate. (5/6)

We analyze motherhood gaps in applications sent every 10 minutes of the day...

Mothers systematically reallocate their search activities from times when children are home to school time! (4/6)

We find large motherhood gaps in job search:

➡️ Mothers send 12% fewer applications than similar women with no kids

➡️ Mothers search for jobs with better wage & non-wage amenities

➡️ Mothers stay unemployed longer

We find no fatherhood gaps. (3/6)

We analyze online job applications linked w/ admin data for 350K French workers who lost their job involuntarily.

Key novelty: we see the exact time when applications are sent!

We compare mothers (fathers) to women (men) without kids who had similar profiles until job loss. (2/6)

Unfortunately I don’t know about a French motivation letters dataset! But that sounds cool, I wish I did!