Female labor supply has increased substantially over the past century. Consequently, more women and men have observed their mother employed which may affect their own labor supply. In this paper, I exploit a tax reform which stimulated labor supply among women with low labor force attachment. Mothers directly affected by the reform increased their labor supply. However, daughters of these women reduce their labor supply and are more likely to have kids and be married. I do not find any effects on the labor supply or fertility of sons. Hence, my results show that a reform which stimulated maternal labor supply can have unintended negative effects on the labor supply of their daughters.

Can “soft law” disclosure policies reduce gender wage inequality? This paper examines Japan’s 2022 pay transparency mandate, which requires firms with 301 or more employees to publicly disclose gender wage gaps under a soft-law regime without monetary penalties. Although the policy applies nationwide, compliance varied across prefectures due to differences in administrative guidance, generating subnational variation in disclosure intensity. Exploiting this variation as plausibly exogenous, I estimate the effects of disclosure using prefecture-by-industry-by-age aggregate data from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure within a fixed-effects framework. Higher disclosure rates reduced the gender wage gap in base pay by 0.046 log points, equivalent to 17.9 percent of the pre-policy gap. The gap narrowed through faster wage growth for women rather than male wage suppression, with effects concentrated in non-manufacturing industries. Overall, the results highlight the distributional effectiveness of information-based regulation operating through reputational incentives.

In gender-equal countries, the gender wage gap is largely driven by earnings losses following childbirth. We study the role of firm wage premiums in shaping these child penalties using Norwegian linked employer–employee data. Applying an AKM framework and event-study design, we show that mothers experience a persistent decline in firm wage premiums after childbirth. This decline reflects reduced job mobility and lower returns to job changes rather than sorting into family-friendly firms. Our findings highlight employer heterogeneity as an important channel through which childbirth affects women’s earnings trajectories.

We study how policy incentives affect women’s labor supply before childbirth, a relevant period for gender gaps in employment and earnings. We exploit a major German parental benefit reform in 2007 that replaced a flat transfer with an earnings-related benefit, strengthening incentives to earn income prior to birth. Using administrative data on the universe of first-time mothers and a difference-in-income-trends design, we find three main results. Women on average reduce labor supply in the year before childbirth. The reform causally increased pre-birth labor supply: earnings rose by up to 50 percent and labor market exit declined by about 5 percentage points, with stronger effects for low-income and married women. We provide suggestive evidence that increased pre-birth labor supply is associated with higher post-birth earnings and employment. Our findings show that earnings-related benefits can induce sizable anticipatory labor supply responses, providing broader implications for the design of wage-replacement policies.