Ill‐informed beliefs: Misperceptions of the costs of unplanned parental absences

Abstract While most heterosexual couples say they want to divide childcare responsibilities evenly, they tend to allocate childcare unevenly. To explain this inconsistency, we focus on one possible channel, beliefs: workers anticipate (correctly or incorrectly) that employers penalize men and women differently for absences from work related to children. We conduct an online hiring experiment using framed “childcare shocks” with workers and employers. We elicit workers' beliefs about employer wage penalties for work absences and examine whether these beliefs align with employers' wage offers. Workers expect employers to penalize workers more harshly than employers do. Workers expect penalties to be worse for men than women, but employers penalize women more than men.