Purpose - The main purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of children’s age on maternal labor supply in Korea using survival analysis. Specifically, we focus on the career re-interruption of women having children under age 12, which has rarely been studied in the existing literature.
Research design, data, and methodology - We use micro data from the Korea Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS) surveyed from 1998 to 2016. Instead of using a pre-school child dummy or the number of young children as an explanatory variable, 9 children’s age dummies are included to capture the effect of nurturing 0 to 9 years old children. This study estimates the hazard of a woman’s exiting the labor market after her first experience of the career interruption, rather than the hazard of the first career interruption itself. A Cox proportional hazard model is applied to numerically capture the impact of children’s age on behavioral changes in maternal labor supply. The sample used in this analysis is women between 15 and 54 years old. Most of all, we restrict the sample to women who had at least a child between 0 and 12 years old at the time of quitting their jobs.
Results - The Cox proportional hazard model estimates show a strong negative effect of a 0-year-old child on maternal labor supply. Mothers with newborns have a high hazard ratio of labor force exit after the re-entry. The hazard of women with infants is three times higher than those with children aged 10 to 18. Additionally, the results show that not only newborns, but also children in the age of school-entry have a negative impact on their mother’s labor supply.
Conclusions - The findings reveal that children’s ages need to be properly expanded and included when analyzing the effect of children and their ages on married women’s labor supply, especially on women’s career re-interruption. A large negative effect of 7-year-old children on maternal labor supply found here indicates that supporting mothers with school age children as well as pre-school children is necessary to prevent mothers from leaving the labor market.

Abstract
 1. Introduction
 2. Literature Review
 3. Methodology
  3.1. 이론적 배경
  3.2. 분석모형
  3.3. 자료
 4. Results
 5. Discussion
  5.1. 연구결과 및 시사점
  5.2. 한계점 및 후속 연구 방향
 References

• Seeun Park(Master’s student, School of Economics, Chung-Ang University) | 박세은
• Sun Go(Associate Professor, School of Economics, Chung-Ang University) | 고 선 Corresponding Author