You are invited to join the weekly Nuremberg Research Seminar in Economics on 15 April 2026, from 13.15 to 14.45 pm. The seminar will be held in room LG 0.423. Sena Coskun (FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg) will be talking about “Navigating Motherhood: Endogeneous Penalties and Career Choice”.
More information can be found here:
Women strategically sort into “family-friendly” sectors characterized by lower returns to experience but also lower per-child penalties, before the birth of their first child. This pre-birth sorting represents an ex-ante career cost, a “sorting penalty” not captured by conventional measures. We build a heterogeneous agent model of career choice and fertility, incorporating both quality-quantity (Q-Q) and time-expenditure (T-E) trade-offs, to quantify this cost. Our central finding is that despite this sorting penalty being surprisingly small, it reveals an important mechanism: Women at the productivity margin are the switchers and use the Q-Q and T-E trade-offs as their primary, more powerful tools to navigate motherhood and career. Our findings highlight that frameworks excluding these trade-offs will overestimate the fertility responses and career costs associated with policies.