The impact of births on single parent’s earnings: Evidence from Spain

Abstract

Taking an event study approach with data from the 2019 Continuous Sample of Working Histories, I study the impact of having a child on single parent’s annual earnings. The main finding is that, although these individuals do not have a partner whom they can share responsibilities with, after the birth of the first child, women’s annual earnings fall, while men’s are unaffected, same as what the literature had found for families with both parents. When the analysis is split by educational level, I find that the birth of the first child has no statistically significant effect on annual earnings of college-educated single-mothers, while it has a negative impact for non-college-educated single mothers. The picture is the opposite for single fathers: annual earnings of highly-educated single fathers are negatively affected by the birth of their first child.