喜当爸爸金腰带 为母则刚收入斩| 经济学人财经（强烈推荐）
1
2
英文部分选自经济学人20240601期财经板块
两项新研究表明，至少在北欧，从长期来看并不会。
Returning fromhis paternity leave last week, your columnist was keen to get writing. After all, numerous studies say parents’ careers can suffer after they have children. Best to immediately dispel any notion that his might do so. But then he remembered that he is a man, and went to get a coffee. For the child penalty, as the career hit is known by economists, is commonly believed to affect mothers alone.
本专栏的作者上周休完陪产假回来，就迫不及待投入写作。毕竟，许多研究表明有了孩子后，父母的职业生涯会受到影响。这种晦气的事最好还是提都别提。但他又想起自己是个男人，于是就该吃吃该喝喝了。生育惩罚（经济学家用这一术语描述生育对于职业生涯的打击）通常只会影响母亲。
In fact, it might be that women returning to work after childbirth can afford to relax, too. It is true that their immediate earnings are likely to fall, and perhaps infuriating that those of new fathers are not. Yet two new studies suggest that, in the long run, compared with women who do not have children, the motherhood penalty may vanish—or even turn into a premium.
事实上，产后重返工作岗位的女性或许也不必那么紧张。但不可否认的是，女性的短期收入很可能会下降，而初为人父的男性，其收入却不受影响，让人气愤。然而，两项新的研究显示，长期来看，相较于没有孩子的女性，生育了孩子的女性或许并没有受到“惩罚”，甚至还能吃到一定的红利。
The disparity between men and women who have children is well known. In a widely cited paper from 2019, Henrik Kleven of Princeton University, with co-authors, charted the careers of Danish parents after their first child was born. Mothers’ pay and working hours plunged, by a third and a fifth, respectively, in the first year after childbirth. Fathers’ careers continued roughly as before.
众所周知，生育对男性和女性的影响程度截然不同。普林斯顿大学的亨里克·克莱文（Henrik Kleven）与合作者于2019年发表的论文研究了丹麦父母在第一个孩子出生后的职业生涯。这篇被广泛引用的论文指出，在生育后的第一年，母亲的薪酬和工作时间分别骤降了三分之一和五分之一。而父亲的职业生涯则与之前大致相同。
男女工资差距大，原因竟然是这个 https://www.guokr.com/article/442817
The same study found that mothers’ careers do not recover. After ten years, the hit to Danish mothers’ incomes was still 20 percentage points bigger than that to fathers’, with larger gaps between those with more children. This was down to women with children either leaving the labour market, working fewer hours or earning a lower hourly wage. The paper’s authors have repeated the exercise for 134 countries, with strikingly similar results.
该研究还发现，母亲的职业生涯之后再也没有恢复。第一个孩子出生十年后，丹麦母亲的收入下降程度仍比父亲高出20 %。而且生育的孩子越多，这一差距就越大。这是因为有孩子的妇女要么离开了劳动力市场，要么工作时间减少，要么时薪降低。论文的作者在134个国家重复了这一研究，结果惊人地相似。
But the difficulty in divining the effect of children is that the stork does not drop babies randomly. To get round this, the Danish paper was based on an “event study”. This supposes mothers’ incomes develop along a smooth trend until they give birth, which causes the trend to break. After the break, each mother’s pay is compared with the trend (continued by other women in the sample who give birth later), and the drop is assumed to be the effect of the child. The same calculation is then carried out for fathers.
但了解生育对职业发展的影响是困难的，因为送子观音也不是随机出手。为了避免这一问题，丹麦的论文采用“事件研究”的分析方法，即假设母亲的收入在生育之前沿着某个趋势平稳上升，直到生育事件将这个趋势打破。若假定其他未生育女性的收入变动仍延续这一趋势，则每位母亲的收入与该趋势的差额，即被推定为生育的影响。之后，再用同样方法计算父亲的收入变化。
Such techniques are useful for pinpointing short-term effects, but work less well when trying to gauge what happens over the long run. Many things change over time for women with children and without, meaning that comparing mothers’ pay to a trend formed by women who have not yet given birth may distort the picture. Take a recent study by Simon Bensnes of Norway’s statistical agency, and co-authors, which shows that women tend to wait to have children until their earnings have started to flatten. In other words, part of the pay gap that opens up in event studies may simply bemama economica in action.
这些方法对于测定短期影响很有用，但在衡量长期影响时则效果不佳。随着时间的推移，已生育和未生育女性的情况都会发生很多变化，这意味着将母亲的收入与尚未生育女性的收入趋势进行比较，得出的结果可能是扭曲的。挪威统计局的西蒙·本斯内斯（Simon Bensnes）与合作者的最新研究表明，女性倾向于等到收入进入平台期时再生育。换句话说，事件研究中出现的部分收入差距可能仅仅是“妈妈经济”的作用。
And so other researchers—including Mr Bensnes and colleagues—approximate randomisation differently, by looking at women undergoing in-vitro fertilisation (ivf). This has the advantage that all potential parents in the sample clearly wish to have a child, but those who succeed are decided by nature and chance. Several such studies have now considered parents from Nordic countries, where researchers can access sensitive data onivf treatments and match them to administrative records.
因此，其他研究人员（包括本斯内斯先生及其合作者）选择观察通过体外受精（IVF）怀孕的女性来模拟随机生育。这种方法的优势在于，样本中所有的潜在父母都明确希望生孩子，但成功与否取决于自然条件和运气。已有若干研究以北欧国家的父母为研究对象，在那里，研究人员可以获取体外受精相关数据并将其与政府记录匹配。
The Norwegian study followed women undergoingivf treatment for roughly a decade, finding that the annual incomes of those who gave birth fell by an average of 22% in the short term, compared with those who remained childless. In the long run, however, this penalty narrowed to just 3%. Fathers’ incomes did not drop; instead, they rose by around 10% over the long run.
这项挪威研究在10年时间里跟踪观察了藉由体外受精生育孩子的女性，发现与未生育女性相比，生育后的女性年收入在短期内平均下降了22%。然而长期来看，这种“生育惩罚”缩小到了区区3%。父亲的收入没有下降，反而在长期增加了大约10%。
A new Danish study considers a longer timeframe. Petter Lundborg of Lund University, along with co-authors, looked at up to 25 years’ worth of data from the point of each woman’s firstivf treatment. They found a similar pattern: a sharp short-term drop in mothers’ earnings, but no long-run earnings penalty compared with women who did not have children. In fact, their data reveal a small “motherhood premium” after about 15 years, which over a lifetime more than compensates for the initial drop.
一项新的丹麦研究考虑了更长的时间范围。隆德大学（Lund University）的彼得·伦德伯格（Petter Lundborg）和合作者们观测了女性第一次尝试体外受精治疗后长达25年的数据。他们发现了相似的规律：母亲的收入在生育后出现短期急剧下降，但长期来看与未生育女性相比并没有落后太多。事实上，他们的研究数据表明，大约在生育15年后，生育女性的收入会有一个小小的“母亲红利”。纵观整个职业生涯，后期“生育红利”对收入的增益，超额弥补了生育后短期的收入下降。
Should such studies be trusted? The researchers are careful to point to the downsides of their own methodologies. As much as the success ofivf treatment sounds random, it may not be. In the Norwegian study, for example, the authors show that education levels are slightly higher for successfully treated mothers.
这类研究可信吗？事实上，学者们也谨慎地指出了他们自身方法论的不足。体外受精的成败看起来有很大的运气成分，但事实可能并非如此。挪威的研究表明，成功通过体外受精怀孕的妈妈们通常有着更高的受教育水平。
Meanwhile, unsuccessfulivf treatment is not harmless. Four researchers from Stanford University recently published a working paper that uses Swedish data. They, too, found no long-term motherhood penalty for women whose treatment succeeded. For those whose treatment did not, the results were disquieting: the women were almost 50% more likely to later take medicine for their mental health, and the couples had a higher chance of divorcing. Both motherhood and fatherhood premiums may thus be related to the suffering of those who remain childless.
与此同时，失败的体外受精治疗并非没有危害。斯坦福大学的四个研究人员最近使用瑞典的数据发表了一篇文章。他们同样未在经治疗后成功生育的女性身上发现长期的母职惩罚。相比之下，治疗失败则会引发令人不安的结果: 女性后续因心理问题接受治疗的概率增加了近50%，夫妻离婚率也有所提升。因此本研究中观察到的母职红利或父职红利，或许都与对照组即治疗失败者的不幸际遇有关。
2.父职溢价 (Fatherhood premium): 指生育对男性带来的正面影响。
Parents from outside Scandinavia may reasonably wonder whether all these results extend to them. Danish and Norwegian mothers’ incomes may recover particularly well because they have significantly better access to child care than those in many other countries. Nordic norms around gender equality could encourage fathers to play a bigger role in raising children, giving women more room to re-start their career.
北欧之外的父母肯定会怀疑这些研究结果能否适用于他们。相比之下，丹麦和挪威的妈妈们享受着更便利的育儿服务，这帮助她们的收入更快回升。北欧国家倡导性别平等，鼓励爸爸们深度参与育儿，为女性重启职业生涯提供了更多空间。
As your columnist pondered such questions, he turned to Claudia Goldin, who won the Nobel prize for economics in 2023, for wisdom. She argues that the “parenthood gap” has three parts: the motherhood penalty, the fatherhood premium, and the cost of being female. The new studies suggest that the motherhood penalty narrows over the course of a career; the fatherhood premium is something of a mystery. But the cost of being female exists regardless of motherhood, and varies from place to place. Researchers have plenty of work ahead to quantify and explain these.rian
思索中，本文作者转向2023年诺贝尔经济学奖的得主克劳迪娅·戈尔丁(Claudia Goldin)寻求答案。她认为“生育代价”由三部分组成：母职惩罚，父职溢价，以及身为女性的成本。最新研究表明，母职惩罚会在职业生涯后期而逐渐缩小，而父职溢价则一个谜团。但确定的是，无论是否生育，身为女性的成本不会消失，而且因地而异。要量化和解释这一现象，学者们还任重道远。
翻译组：
Dreamian, 寻找方向
Harold，不狂不放不申花
Humi，不负韶华，平视世界
Cecilia，今年过得贵妇一点
风筝，热爱生活 热爱翻译 热爱搞钱 热爱猫咪
Ithil, or be more cruel, love, and so be kind.
3
感想 | 观点
3
愿景
微信扫码关注该文公众号作者