Economic transition and the motherhood wage penalty in urban China: investigation using panel data
利用1990-2005年面板数据，研究发现中国城市中母亲工资显著低于无子女女性，且经济转型加剧了这一惩罚，尤其在非国有部门。
China's economic transition has fundamentally changed the mechanisms for allocating and compensating labour. This paper investigates how the economic transition has affected the wage gap between mothers and childless women in urban China using panel data for the period 1990–2005. The results show that overall, mothers earned considerably less than childless women; additionally, the wage penalties for motherhood went up substantially from the gradualist reform period (1990–96) to the radical reform period (1999–2005). The results also show that that although motherhood does not appear to have a significant wage effect for the state sector, it imposes substantial wage losses for mothers in the non-state sector. These findings suggest that the economic transition has shifted part of the cost of childbearing and -rearing from the state and employers back to women, in the form of lower earnings for working mothers. Copyright , Oxford University Press.