Chapter 1 Introduction

Chapter 2 Motherhood and the Labor Market Penalty: Discussion on Perceptional Change

Chapter 3 Effect of Increased Demand for Childcare Time on Parents’ Allocation of Working Hours

Chapter 4 Mothers’ Selection into Work in South Korea

Chapter 5 Conclusions 

The South Korean (hereafter Korean) government has called for the creation of a society where mothers and fathers work and care for their children together in its recent Low Fertility-Aging Society (LF-AS) strategic plans (revisions to 3rd and 4th plans in 2018 and 2020, respectively). Before then, policies aimed at tackling the downward fertility trend focused narrowly on inducing women to have more children.

The government’s recent shift in focus, however, has not been adequately supported by empirical works investigating the relationship between children and parents’ labor supply in the Korean context. In the previous policy approaches to the low fertility problem, policy makers did not consider the relationship between fertility choices and parents’ labor market participation and outcome comprehensively.

Even though this change in policy direction seems reasonable in the face of the extremely low fertility rate and expected shortage of workforce in the near future in Korea, we need a clear picture of the status quo and to identify the areas requiring government intervention based on quantitative analyses.

To help broaden the insights into the relationship between parenthood and labor market participation, we propose an empirical analysis of three different topics related to children and parents’ labor supply, using recent data from various sources.