TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Musayir, Arlan
AU  - Arabsheibani, Reza
        TI  - Motherhood and Informality: Empirical Evidence from Russia
        PY  - 2025/May/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 17916
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp17916
        AB  - This paper investigates the causal impact of childbirth on women’s likelihood of informal employment in Russia using twenty years of RLMS. We apply an event study framework following Kleven et al. (2019) to quantify child penalties in labour market outcomes and whether women are more likely to find themselves working informally following the birth of their first child. We find that childbirth significantly increases the probability of informal employment for women. The rise in informality is concentrated in only the first year after childbirth. For first-time mothers this transition is largely involuntary. Our findings align with recent evidence on Russia’s relatively integrated but segmented informal labour market (Bargain et al. 2021).
        KW  - female employment
KW  - informality
KW  - fertility
        ER  -