The literature has documented important drops in employment, working hours and earnings for women after childbirth. We study job separations around child births, and their employment consequences, using administrative data from Spain, in an event study design combined with propensity score matching. We identify a large spike in job separations for women five months after giving birth, which coincides with the end of maternity leave in Spain. We find that women who are laid off or end their temporary contracts in those months are more likely to become unemployed, and to stay unemployed substantially longer. Our results suggest that part of the child penalty might be driven by firm's hiring practices towards new mothers.

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