TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Almar, Frederik
AU  - Friedrich, Benjamin
AU  - Reynoso, Ana
AU  - Schulz, Bastian
AU  - Vejlin, Rune Majlund
        TI  - Families’ Career Investments and Firms’ Promotion Decisions
        PY  - 2025/Jan/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 17653
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp17653
        AB  - This paper studies how family and firm investments interact to explain gender gaps in career
achievement. Using Danish administrative data, we first document novel evidence of this interaction
through a “spousal effect” on firm-side career investments. This effect is accounted for by family
labor supply choices that shape worker characteristics, which then influence firms’ training and
promotion decisions. Our main theoretical contribution is to develop a quantitative life cycle model
that captures these family-firm interactions through household formation, families’ joint career and
fertility choices, and firms’ managerial training and promotion decisions. We then use the estimated
model to show that the interaction between families and firms in the joint equilibrium of labor and
marriage markets is important when evaluating firm-side and family-side policy interventions. We
find that gender-equal parental leave and a managerial quota can both improve gender equality, but
leave implies costly skill depreciation, whereas the quota raises aggregate welfare, in part through
adjustments in marital sorting towards families that invest in women.
        KW  - marriage market matching
KW  - Gender inequality
KW  - career investments
KW  - firm training
KW  - management promotions
        ER  -