Jon H. Fiva

Child Penalties in Politics

In a recent CESifo Working Paper (9611), Jon H. Fiva (together with Max-Emil King) has studied child penalties in politics. Using extensive administrative data from Norway and an event-study methodology, the authors determined that women tend to drop out of local politics to a larger extent than men after their first child is born. Parenthood also seems to have a differential long-term effect on women and men’s political careers, which may explain why women, especially women with children, are underrepresented at higher levels of the political hierarchy.

Mr. Fiva’s research agenda is centered at the intersection of Political Economy and Applied Microeconomics. He is currently leading a project on the dynamics of political selection funded by the Norwegian Research Council. Together with his collaborators, Mr. Fiva studies questions such as: What determines the career progression of an individual politician? Do all citizens of comparable quality have a fair chance of rising in the political hierarchy? How do political parties incentivize candidates to induce effort?

Jon H. Fiva is a Professor of Economics at the Norwegian Business School where he teaches Econometrics and Causal Inference. Before joining the Norwegian Business School, he was at the University of Oslo. He has previously been a visiting scholar at Harvard University (2013/14) and Stanford University (2018/19) and is also a CESifo Research Network Fellow. He was awarded a PhD in Economics from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), where he also did his undergraduate work.

His work has been published in numerous journals including the Journal of Public Economics, the British Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, the American Political Science Review, the Quarterly Journal of Political Science, the American Political Science Review, the European Economic Review and the Scandinavian Journal of Economics.