Published in: Journal of Labor Economics, Forthcoming (2026). (with Simon Bensnes and Ingrid Huitfeldt)
This paper reconciles estimates of the labor market effects of having children for women undergoing IVF treatment. We derive an event-IV estimator that places the Lundborg et al. (2017) IV and the standard event study estimator on a common child-age scale. All approaches yield a 15 percent increase in the earnings gap between mothers and their partners, but they differ in incidence. Our event-IV estimates imply that maternal losses account for less than half of the gap, whereas the standard event study attributes the gap to lower maternal earnings. Adjusting for IVF-attempt-timing removes most of this difference.
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