Description
Sonja Spitzer is a researcher at the Vienna Institute of Demography and a lecturer at the University of Vienna. She is also affiliated with the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. Previously, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago and the Paris School of Economics. Her research seeks to understand the causes of health and earnings disparities across gender and socioeconomic groups by combining demographic and microeconomic perspectives to study how human capital, life events, and labour-market outcomes interact across the life course. She also leads the European Parenting Leave Policies Dataset, serves as an editor of the Vienna Yearbook of Population Research, and is a health expert advisor for the Austrian Socio-Economic Panel Survey.
She is Principal Investigator of the project „Skill loss during parental leave and its role for gender disparities in earnings“, which examines whether skill depreciation during child-related career interruptions contributes to gender pay differences. Using linked administrative data and work-related skill measures for Austria and Sweden, as well as cross-country analyses of parental leave regulations across 21 European countries since 1970, the project provides the first empirical evidence on whether extended leave affects parents’ skills and, in turn, their earnings and labour-market trajectories.
