Ongoing research
The Missing Female Inventors: Family Formation and the Gender Gap in Innovation
“The Missing Female Inventors: Family Formation and the Gender Gap in Innovation” (2025, with Clemens Müller and Stefan Obernberger),
Available at SSRN
Women remain severely underrepresented among inventors, and the reasons for this gap remain debated. Linking German administrative labor records to patent filings for 1.6 million innovation workers, we document that the gap arises overwhelmingly inside patenting firms and identify family formation as a key driver. Men are 1.7 times more likely to enter innovation-related jobs but, conditional on entry, nearly six times more likely to patent. Using a dynamic difference-in-differences design, we show that childbirth is followed by persistent declines in patenting, earnings, and career progression among female innovation workers, whereas fatherhood has little effect. Four years later, roughly half of the decline in patenting remains even after accounting for labor supply, mobility, and occupation. Patent quality also deteriorates, suggesting that motherhood affects the nature of inventive work. Consistent with anticipating these costs, women in innovation are less likely to have children, and they time childbirth around their careers. Absent the innovation child penalty, the number of female inventors would be at least 30% higher.
Changing Fertility and Heterogeneous Motherhood Effects:
Revisiting the Effects of a Parental Benefits Reform
“Changing Fertility and Heterogeneous Motherhood Effects: Revisiting the Effects of a Parental Benefits Reform” (2024, with Bernd Fitzenberger), IZA Discussion Paper No. 16966
Using a semiparametric event study approach with a control group, we estimate the effect of motherhood on labor market outcomes in Germany, the child penalty. We further investigate how the 2007 parental benefits reform changed the child penalty while accounting for fertility effects. A large novel data set linking data from two administrative sources provides information on all births. Our estimation approach accounts for motherhood being a staggered treatment. The reform has small positive medium-run effects employment outcomes. It changes the selection into fertility and shows heterogeneous effects. However, the reform did little to reduce the average child penalty.