While existing literature highlights the career costs of childbearing as a potential contributor to low fertility in high-income countries, few empirical studies investigate how women form beliefs about these costs and whether such beliefs shape their fertility decisions. Using a sample of South Korean female workers aged 19 to 40 years, we conduct an online survey to examine the relationship between the individuals' beliefs about the career costs of children and their family formation plans. We also execute an information provision experiment to assess how objective information about the likelihood of women working post-childbirth leads to changes in beliefs and family formation plans. We find that female respondents hold pessimistic expectations about their own post-childbirth employment, partly because they underestimate the extent to which mothers in Korea remain in the workforce. These pessimistic beliefs are strongly associated with lower fertility and marriage intentions, particularly among women with strong current career prospects and higher incomes. Information provision leads to only modest changes in intentions, as many respondents interpret higher maternal employment as reflecting financial necessity rather than improved work–family compatibility. Overall, the study underscores the importance of beliefs—and their interpretation—in shaping family formation decisions.

This paper examines how unconditional income support affects labor supply decisions among financially dependent young adults. We study a universal cash transfer program in Seongnam, South Korea, which provided 1 million KRW (about 19.1% of annual earnings) in quarterly payments to all 24-year-olds for one year. Using administrative panel data and a difference-in-differences design, we compare eligible youth in Seongnam with those in nearby cities not exposed to the program. In the short run, the transfer lowered the probability of holding a job by 0.8 percentage points from a 32% baseline and reduced quarterly earnings by about 2%, driven mainly by reduced participation in part-time work. The implied labor-supply elasticity with respect to individual earnings is –0.12. These effects fade once payments end, and we detect no differences in employment or total earnings in the three years after the transfer period, aside from a negligible carryover in job tenure. Overall, the program induces a temporary income effect without lasting impacts on early-career labor-market outcomes.

Do workplace amenities mitigate the motherhood penalty? Linking matched employer–employee administrative data with hand-collected information on workplace amenities for 962 Korean firms, we document substantial heterogeneity in motherhood penalties across companies. We find that women initially employed at family-friendly firms are more likely to remain in the labor market after childbirth, while those at less supportive firms tend to exit rather than switch to more accommodating employers. Using a machine learning–based causal forest approach, we further show that flexible work arrangements, onsite childcare, and remote work options are the amenities most strongly associated with smaller post-birth declines in employment and earnings. These findings highlight the importance of workplace institutions that enable work–family compatibility in retaining female talent and narrowing gender gaps in career progression.