The impact on wages and worked hours of childbirth in France

Using French administrative data, we estimate the impact of the birth of a first, second and third child on hourly wages, as well as for hours worked, for both women and men. We compute the impact on these out- come variables, two, four and six years after the birth of the child, and focus on the distinction between highly educated women and women with a high school degree or less. We also take the maternity leave (or pa- ternity leave in case of men) duration into account. Estimation is done with difference-in-differences and we compute bootstrapped confidence intervals. Results show both lower and highly educated women decrease significantly their working hours after the birth of their child. Men are, for the most part, not much impacted by the birth of their children. Ma- ternity leave duration influences the magnitude of the impact of the birth, especially on the hourly wages of educated women.