No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Causal Effects of Paternity Leave on Children and Parents
Abstract
In this paper we use a parental leave reform directed towards fathers to identify the causal effects of paternity leave on children’s and parents’ outcomes. We document that paternity leave causes fathers to become more important for children’s cognitive skills. School performance at age 16 increases for children whose father is relatively higher educated than the mother. We find no evidence that fathers’ earnings and work hours are affected by paternity leave. Contrary to expectation, mothers’ labor market outcomes are adversely affected by paternity leave. Our findings do therefore not suggest that paternity leave shifts the gender balance at home in a way that increases mothers’ time and/or effort spent at market work.
... From earlier studies, we know that the introduction of the quotas had a direct impact on fathers' leave use (Duvander and Johansson 2012;Dahl et al. 2014) and that childcare during the preschool years was influenced (Duvander and Johansson 2019). We also know from an earlier Norwegian study that completed fertility on average does not seem to have been affected by the reform (Cools et al. 2015). In addition to the importance of nuancing these initial results by analyzing second-and third-birth intensity separately, we are specifically interested in comparing the two countries. ...
... Among leave users, the average leave use was 25 days, and most fathers took exactly the quota allotted. Only 10% of the fathers took more than the quota, but this percentage has increased over time (Cools et al. 2015). Another Norwegian study on the increase in fathers' parental leave use confirm these results and further found that the share of fathers using parental leave increased to 60% during the first five years after the reform and then to 70% in the following five years (Dahl et al. 2014). ...
... The father's quotas are directly aimed at changing the uneven division of work in the household. Whether they have actually changed the long-term division of labor market and household work is debated (Karimi et al. 2012;Duvander and Johansson 2012;Rege and Solli 2013;Schober 2014;Cools et al. 2015). The effect we are interested in is how such changes in the gender-equal division of labor market work and household work (including childcare) may affect continued childbearing by couples. ...
It has been argued that a generous family policy aimed at a gender-equal division of childcare and economic responsibility will have a positive impact on childbearing. In this study, we investigate whether fathers’ parental leave use is related to continued childbearing and whether there has been a policy effect on fertility behavior due to the introduction of the father’s quota in Norway and Sweden. Fathers’ parental leave use may affect fertility by easing women’s work burden at home and thus enhancing the degree of compatibility between childrearing and female employment, and it may increase fathers’ interest in children and childcare. To distinguish causality from selection in the effects observed, we use the natural experiment of the introduction of the father’s quotas. The results indicate that the reforms did not influence fertility in Norway but that Swedish couples with a lower income had a temporary higher third-birth risk. Fathers in this group showed the greatest increase in leave use after the reform.
... We do know that fathers are somewhat less likely to take leave from their jobs but are more likely to do so when the leave is paid. For example, Cools, Fiva, and Kirkebøen (2015) analyzed the adoption of paid paternity leave in Norway in 1993 and found that the share of men taking paternity leave increased significantly, compared to the time period before adoption of the mandate. In fact, in 1993, the share of men taking paternity leave was 24.6 percent and by 2006, it was 60 percent (Cools et al., 2015). ...
... For example, Cools, Fiva, and Kirkebøen (2015) analyzed the adoption of paid paternity leave in Norway in 1993 and found that the share of men taking paternity leave increased significantly, compared to the time period before adoption of the mandate. In fact, in 1993, the share of men taking paternity leave was 24.6 percent and by 2006, it was 60 percent (Cools et al., 2015). Similarly, Marshall (2008) found that after Canada extended the Parental Benefits Program from 10 to 35 weeks in 2001, the proportion of fathers filing for parental leave benefits increased by approximately 10 percent. ...
... As in Fig. 2, most countries had adopted paid maternity leave prior to 1990. Finally, studies such as Cools et al. (2015) and Marshall (2008) primarily analyzed the effect of paid family leave for a specific country. The results from one country may not be applicable to another country given differing economic and political structures. ...
During the past four decades, most OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries have adopted or expanded paid family leave, which offers leave to workers following the birth or adoption of a child as well as care for ill family members. While the effects of paid maternity leave on child health have been the subject of a large body of research, little is known about fathers’ leave-taking and the effects of paid paternity leave. This is a limitation, since most of the recent expansion in paid family leave in OECD countries has been to expand leave benefits to fathers. Mothers’ and fathers’ leave-taking may improve child health by decreasing postpartum depression among mothers, improving maternal mental health, increasing the time spent with a child, and increasing the likelihood of child medical checkup. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of paid family leave on the wellbeing of children, extending what we know about the effects of maternity leave and establishing new evidence on paternity leave. The paper examines the effects of paid family leave expansions on country-level neonatal mortality rates, infant mortality rates, under-five mortality rates, and the measles immunization rates in 35 OECD countries, during the time period of 1990 to 2016. Using an event study design, an approximately 1.9 to 5.2 percent decrease in the infant, neonatal, and under-five mortality rates has been found following the adoption of paid maternity leave. However, the beneficial impact is not as visible for extension of paid leave to fathers. The implications and potential reasons behind the larger protective effects of maternity leave over paternity leave on child health outcomes are discussed.
... However, the positive relationship is not necessarily confirmed in studies examining for a causal relationship (Cools et al., 2015;Duvander et al., 2020;Hart et al., 2019;Farré & González, 2019). ...
... Further to this, a few studies offer a causal analysis of fathers' uptake of leave on fertility based on quasi-natural experiments made possible by reforms in fathers' leave policy. Two studies, each by Cools et al. (2015) and Hart et al. (2019) find no evidence that paternity leave affects fertility in Norway. A recent publication by Duvander et al. (2020) similarly finds that the introduction of father's leave quotas did not affect fertility in Norway while it finds a positive but temporary effect only on third-birth risks for lower-income couples in Sweden. ...
... For instance, Chapter VII found leave-taking fathers' greater involvement in unpaid labour to be explained primarily by selection effects, unlike how studies have found a causal impact from multiple Western settings (Bünning, 2015;Kotsadam & Finseraas, 2011;Patnaik, 2019;Schober, 2014;Tamm, 2019;Wray, 2020). Moreover, Chapter VIII found fathers in Korea to adjust their fertility intentions downwards after taking leave, in line with Farré and González's study of Spain (2019), but not studies of Nordic countries (Duvander & Andersson 2006;Duvander et al. 2010;Oláh 2003; see also Cools et al., 2015;Duvander et al., 2020;Hart et al., 2019). While my study has focused on Korea, they are relevant for and have implications for other East Asian countries as well as limited Western countries that share family and gender cultures and welfare state traditions that is more comparable with Korea than the Nordic countries, such as Spain, as well as other Southern and Eastern European countries. ...
While interest in fathers’ uptake of leave is increasing internationally, the extant literature on fathers’ leave primarily documents Western, especially Nordic contexts. Against such a backdrop, my thesis investigates the determinants and aftermaths of fathers’ uptake of leave in South Korea using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative data and methods. I focus on to what extent fathers’ leave contributes to equalising the gendered division of unpaid labour, elevating childbearing intentions, and reconciliation of childcare and employment. The first paper gives a general comparison of leave-takers and non-takers based on a national survey. I find fathers’ employment in the private sector or large private sector companies to be the most salient sociodemographic determinant of their uptake of leave, followed by mothers’ bargaining power. I further find that dual-earner fathers who take leave contribute significantly more to housework and childcare than their counterparts. Moreover, the mothers of leave-taking fathers report lower intentions for a second child and significantly greater work-family conflict. The second paper assesses whether fathers’ uptake of parental leave contributes to a more equitable division of unpaid labour based on original survey data. I find that it is mostly the selection of fathers already involved in housework and developmental childcare which explains most of the difference between fathers who have taken leave and those who have not. There is only limited evidence to suggest that very long leaves of one year or longer could potentially make fathers more involved in the case of routine childcare. The third paper inquires whether fathers’ leave is pro-natalist by exploring the processes and mechanisms by which fathers’ uptake of parental leave impacts intentions for additional children. Both my quantitative and qualitative analysis confirms that fathers’ parental leave has an anti- rather than pro-natalist effect. Findings demonstrate that in countries with poor support for the reconciliation of employment and childcare, equalising the gendered division of parental leave alone may not be sufficient to see a reversal in its fertility trends. The fourth paper studies how norms about childcare and working hours shape fathers’ decisions to take (long) leave as well as their work-family balance after leave. My analysis of interview and blog data finds that fathers are often pushed to take (long) leave as a last resort in an absence of more desirable alternatives to care for a young child. These conditions continue to constrain parents after the end of the fathers’ leave and limit the otherwise more radical impact that fathers’ uptake of leave could have on work-family balance and gender equality. Overall, I argue that in a context characterised by high levels of work-family conflict and where a minority of fathers take leave, fathers’ leave plays a rather limited role in contributing to a more gender-egalitarian work-family balance, at least for the time being. My thesis extends the empirical literature on fathers’ leave to an East Asian country based on the utilisation of original and multi- data and mixed methods and demonstrates the importance of accounting for context in designing, implementing, and researching leave policy.
... The Nordic welfare states aim to support lifelong, full-time work for men and women alike, and the combination of work and children is today enabled by long paid parental leaves of about one year (Dahl et al. 2016) and widely available public childcare for children above that age (Rindfuss et al. 2010). Fathers' quotas to parental leave aim to ensure that the combination of caregiving and paid work is shared more equally between the parents (Cools et al. 2015). ...
... Paternity quotas are established by reserving sharable weeks for the father, and/or by adding weeks reserved for the father to the total parental leave. Evaluations of the introduction and extensions of paternity quotas in the Nordic countries show no significant effects in the main samples (see Cools et al. 2015 for its introduction in Norway; Duvander et al. 2020 for its introduction in Sweden and Norway; and Hart et al. 2019b for the extension in Norway). This holds both in the short and in the long run (see Table 3). ...
... From both the Central European and Nordic regimes, we find solid evidence of positive effects of childcare (Bauernschuster et al. 2016;Mörk et al. 2013;Rindfuss et al. 2007Rindfuss et al. , 2010Wood and Neels 2019). Features of parental leave reforms in Nordic countries mean that the estimated reform effect is a poor measure of the total policy effect (Cools et al. 2015;Dahl et al. 2016;Duvander et al. 2020;Hart et al. 2019b;Liu and Skans 2010). For parental leave, studies from Central Europe capture more substantial policy changes, and bear evidence of positive fertility effects of substantial magnitude (Lalive and Zweimüller 2009;Raute 2019). ...
In the course of the twentieth century, social scientists and policy analysts have produced a large volume of literature on whether policies boost fertility. This paper describes the results of a systematic review of the literature on the effects of policy on fertility since 1970 in Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Empirical studies were selected through extensive systematic searches, including studies using an experimental or quasi-experimental design. Thirty-five studies were included, covering reforms of parental leave, childcare, health services, and universal child transfers. In line with previous reviews, we find that childcare expansions increase completed fertility, while increased cash transfers have temporary effects. New evidence on parental leave expansions, particularly from Central Europe, suggests larger effects than previously established. High-earning couples benefit more from parental leave expansions, while expanding childcare programs can reduce social inequalities on other domains. Subsidizing assisted reproductive treatments shows some promise of increasing birth rates for women over the age of 35. Countries that to date have limited support for families can build on solid evidence if they choose to expand these programs.
... Analysing the 1993 implementation of a four-week daddy quota in Norway, Kotsadam and Finseraas (2011) found that parents exposed to the policy were 50% more likely to share the task of washing clothes equally between partners 15 years post reform, suggesting the policy was successful in encouraging de-specialization. However, Cools et al. (2015), studying the same reform, found no evidence that the policy benefited mothers' labour market outcomes 2 to 5 years post reform. In fact, their analysis of the policy's effects on mothers found it decreased their annual earnings by 3.5%, with negligible effects on employment, full-time and part-time employment. ...
... Our estimates show that QPIP increases mothers' labour force participation and full-time employment and decreases their parttime employment and unemployment, in line with Patnaik's (2019) findings that the policy increased mothers' time spent in paid work. However, these findings are at odds with the null and negative effects on mothers' labour supply in Norway identified by Ekberg et al. (2013) and by Cools et al. (2015), respectively. On the other hand, our non-significant results regarding QPIP's effect on mothers' wages appears to contrast both Johansson's (2010) and Andersen's (2018) positive estimates and Cools et al.'s (2015) negative one. ...
... However, these findings are at odds with the null and negative effects on mothers' labour supply in Norway identified by Ekberg et al. (2013) and by Cools et al. (2015), respectively. On the other hand, our non-significant results regarding QPIP's effect on mothers' wages appears to contrast both Johansson's (2010) and Andersen's (2018) positive estimates and Cools et al.'s (2015) negative one. ...
This paper investigates whether daddy quotas – non-transferable paternity leave policies – mitigate motherhood penalties women face in the labour market. Using the introduction of a daddy quota in Quebec, Canada as a natural experiment, we employ labour force survey data to conduct a difference-in-difference estimation of the policy’s impact on a range of mothers’ career outcomes, using mothers in the neighbouring province of Ontario as a comparison group. The results suggest Quebec mothers exposed to the policy are 5 percentage points more likely to participate in the labour force and to work full time, 5 percentage points less likely to work part time, and 4 percentage points less likely to be unemployed than they would have been in the absence of the policy. Our results are robust to an alternative semi-parametric difference-in-difference methodology and to a battery of placebo and sensitivity tests. However, we find that the policy’s effects are largest 2 to 3 years post-reform, reducing in size and significance thereafter, raising questions about the durability of such effects.
... Longer leaves are associated with larger reductions in wages (Ejrnaes & Kunze, 2013;Evertsson, 2016). On the other hand, research has typically not found evidence of a cost in wages or subsequent work outcomes for fathers who take paternity leave (Cools et al., 2015;Farre & Gonzalez, 2017; however see Rege & Solli, 2013). Paternity leave is generally found to increase within-family equality by increasing mother's subsequent wages rather than by decreasing men's subsequent wages (Andersen, 2018). ...
... Again, given our perspective on the most likely influence of the PECs included within this analysis, differences in specifications between models with and without PECs may suggest that revenue and team structure are two mechanisms through which taking parental leave affects income among financial advisors. This finding is interesting within the context of the existing literature, as parental leave is more commonly associated with a decline in earnings for women (Ejrnaes & Kunze, 2013;Evertsson, 2016), whereas men commonly see no effect (Cools et al., 2015;Farre & Gonzalez, 2017) or a decrease in future earnings (Rege & Solli, 2013). While outside of the scope of the present study, it is possible that selfemployment-and the potential lifestyle flexibility that it can afford-is influencing these findings. ...
This study examined marital and parental income premiums among financial advisors. Financial advisors provide an interesting context for exploring such premiums, as financial advising is a historically male-dominated profession that has been found to exhibit large unadjusted gender pay gaps. Using a large, cross-sectional sample of financial advisors recruited via a professional continuing education website (n = 459), this study investigates whether gender differences exist among financial advisors with respect to the marriage premium, the parenthood premium, the parental leave effect, and the stay-at-home spouse premium. This study examined premiums both with and without potentially endogenous human capital covariates. Without including potentially endogenous covariates, a marriage premium was observed among men but not women, a parenthood premium was observed among women and a penalty observed among men, a parental leave penalty was observed among neither men nor women, and a stay-at-home spouse premium was observed among men but not women. When potentially endogenous covariates were included, a marriage penalty was observed among women but not men, a parenthood premium was observed among women while a parenthood penalty was observed among men, a parental leave premium was observed among men but not women, and a stay-at-home spouse premium was observed among men while a stay-at-home spouse penalty was observed among women. Exploratory Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analyses revealed sizeable unadjusted income gaps by gender (15.0%), marriage (40.2%), parenthood (7.4%), parental leave (11.6%), and spousal employment (41.0%).
... Opinber stefna sem tryggir feðrum sjálfstaeðan rétt til faeðingarorlofs, með tekjutengdum greiðslum, byggir á markmiði um að auka þátttöku feðra í umönnun barna sinna, enda sýna alþjóðlegar rannsóknir að virk þátttaka beggja foreldra í umönnun barns hefur mjög jákvaeð áhrif á alhliða þroska þess (sjá t.d. Cools, Fiva & Kirkebøen 2015;Sarkadi, Kristiansson, Oberklaid & Bremberg 2008). Auk þess er talið að aukið jafnraeði í því hvernig foreldrar skipta með sér orlofi styrki stöðu maeðra á vinnumarkaði, þar sem löng fjarvera maeðra frá vinnumarkaði, vegna faeðingar barns, hefur neikvaeð áhrif á laun þeirra og framgangsmöguleika (Kahn, García-Manglano & Bianchi 2014). ...
... Fjölmargar rannsóknir sýna að umönnunarþátttaka feðra, eftir að faeðingarorlofi lýkur, eykst með tilkomu sjálfstaeðs réttar feðra til töku faeðingarorlofs (sjá t.d. Cools, Fiva & Kirkebøen 2015;Kotsadam & Finseraas 2011;Rege & Solli 2013;Schober 2014). Þá kom fram í nýlegri skýrslu Alþjóðaheilbrigðismálastofnunar (Incley o.fl. ...
Í maí 2000 samþykkti Alþingi einróma lög nr. 95/2000 um fæðingar- og foreldraorlof. Lögin fólu í sér afar róttækar breytingar á aðstæðum nýbakaðra foreldra. Samkvæmt markmiðum laganna áttu þau að stuðla að því að börn nytu samvista við foreldra sína og auðvelda konum og körlum að samþætta atvinnuog fjölskyldulíf. Þessi lög voru í gildi þar til heildarendurskoðun leiddi til laga nr. 144/2020. Í þessari grein er spurt að hvaða leyti löggjöfin hafi náð hinu tvíþætta markmiði. Gögn, sem aflað með könnunum meðal foreldra á fjórum tímapunktum yfir tæplega 20 ára tímabil, voru nýtt til að greina breytingar á þátttöku mæðra og feðra í umönnun fyrsta barns og breytingar á vinnumarkaðsþátttöku mæðra og feðra ári fyrir fæðingu barnsins og þar til það nær þriggja ára aldri. Niðurstöður sýna að frá gildistöku laganna hafa feður aukið þátttöku sína í umönnun barna sinna og dregið hefur saman með foreldrum hvað varðar atvinnuþátttöku og vinnutíma.
... For Sweden, Ekberg Eriksson, and Friebel (2013) find that the parental leave reform from 1995, which earmarked one month of parental leave for fathers, increased the uptake of paternity leave by fathers, though the study finds no effect on parents' long-term wages and employment in a supplementary analysis. For Norway, both Rege and Solli (2013) and Cools, Fiva, and Kirkebøen (2015) analyze how the introduction of a four-week paternity leave quota in Norway affected the employment outcomes of parents using administrative data. Although Rege and Solli (2013) find that four weeks of paternity leave during the child's first year reduce fathers' earnings five years after child birth by 2.2%, they observe no impact on mothers' employment. ...
... Although Rege and Solli (2013) find that four weeks of paternity leave during the child's first year reduce fathers' earnings five years after child birth by 2.2%, they observe no impact on mothers' employment. In contrast, Cools, Fiva, and Kirkebøen (2015) find no significant effect on fathers' employment status or earnings (though similar point estimates), but their results suggest a negative impact on mothers' earnings. For Germany, Tamm (2019) finds evidence that taking paternity leave increases fathers' later involvement in child-rearing and household activities, though he does not detect any effects on labor market participation in the longer run. ...
This dissertation consists of four self-contained empirical studies in applied labor economics. The first study analyzes the effects of minimum wages on labor and product market outcomes in a highly competitive sector. The second study investigates the effects of minimum wages on the educational plans of (low-skilled) teenagers. The third study provides novel evidence on gender differences in the labor market. The fourth study analyzes the benefits and drawbacks of different statistical learning techniques with respect to their ability to predict long-term unemployment among jobseekers.
... Before the daddy quota, fewer than 3% of fathers took paternity leave. This share grew to 25% in the month after the law was changed, and then to 60% in 2006 (Cools et al. 2015). As of 2018, more than 70% of men use this quota, and a large share of men additionally take some of the rest of the parental leave that can be used by either parent. ...
... People see fathering as manly and as sexy. What is more, the daddy quota has helped to equalize other as-COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON THE CAREGIVING CRISIS, WELFARE STATES, AND MEN'S ROLES (CONTINUED) pects of the gender division of household labor and improved child well being (Cools et al., 2015;Kotsadam and Finseraas, 2011;Kotsadam and Finseraas 2013). ...
What is the relationship between economic crises and populism? Once almost exclusively the domain of Latin Americanists, the study of populism has emerged as a leading research agenda for scholars who study Europe and the US. However, researchers have hitherto failed to systematically account for the logic of economic populism and the fact that populists emanating from either the left or the right tend to converge on a similar political economic model: protectionism, crony capitalism, and inveterate rent seeking. We provide a framework to make sense of this pattern and explain the systematic, mutually reinforcing association between crises and populism. We also adduce supporting evidence from very different places, Argentina, Chile, Spain, Greece, and Italy, and across disparate time periods. We argue that populism almost always threatens both liberal democracy and welfare state capitalism and ushers in economic collapse. We posit that a key reason for this is that, rather than seeing economic interactions as “win-win” situations, populists are obsessed with zero-sum thinking. We also speculate about what might be in store for European politics in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.
... Before the daddy quota, fewer than 3% of fathers took paternity leave. This share grew to 25% in the month after the law was changed, and then to 60% in 2006 (Cools et al. 2015). As of 2018, more than 70% of men use this quota, and a large share of men additionally take some of the rest of the parental leave that can be used by either parent. ...
... People see fathering as manly and as sexy. What is more, the daddy quota has helped to equalize other as-COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES ON THE CAREGIVING CRISIS, WELFARE STATES, AND MEN'S ROLES (CONTINUED) pects of the gender division of household labor and improved child well being (Cools et al., 2015;Kotsadam and Finseraas, 2011;Kotsadam and Finseraas 2013). ...
An analysis of 2020 has been a year of interlocking crises, the
like of which most of us have not known in our lifetime. The public health crisis of COVID-19 has impacted on the pre-existing crises of democratic stability and effective administration and governance, culminating in significant debate about the ability of developed democracies to respond effectively to emergencies confronting their citizens (see Allen et al 2020, Bermeo and Pontusson 2012, King and Le Gales 2017). These crises, much discussed in recent political science, have now been joined by a further crisis which both complicates and reinforces many of them: a migration crisis.
... This points to the importance of understanding the social setting at the introduction of a reform, as a similar reform can have different effects in different social settings. They found that the reform did not influence fertility in Norway, which is substantiated by another study of the same reform in Norway by Cools, et al., (2015). However, in Sweden the introduction of a father quota led to a temporary rise in third birth risks among lower income couples in Sweden. ...
... In addition, men reported lower desired fertility after the reform, possibly due to their increased awareness of the costs of childrearing, or to a shift in preferences to invest more in each existing child (Farré & González, 2019). (Cools, et al., 2015) Probability of second and third births ...
The Centre for Population has commissioned this report from the Australian National University to explain trends and drivers of fertility in Australia and better understand the impact of government policies on fertility decisions. Modern life, particularly the ability to negotiate work and family lives, has led to declining fertility rates across high-income countries. Many individuals’ preferences for desired number of children are higher than the number of children that people eventually have, suggesting that there are barriers to having children. Over time, childbearing has increasingly been delayed to later ages, potentially contributing to fertility difficulties for couples if left too late in the reproductive lifespan.
This report includes three components: a literature review, an analysis of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) panel study, and questions about fertility intentions and family policies that were included in a survey of Australians.The literature review demonstrates the importance of policies that provide stability and support for
raising children, for participation in employment through parental leave and child care, and that reduce the financial costs for parents. It also points to the importance of shared gender roles supported by public policies which support both parents’ involvement in work and family, through the availability of leave and the provision of child care. The HILDA analysis investigates the impacts that policies have on fertility using quasi-experimental methods. The policies considered include the introduction of the baby bonus, paid parental leave,
paid partner leave, and adjustments to family tax benefits. The analysis does not provide convincing causal evidence of changes in births due to the introduction of these policies.
The survey analysis reinforces which issues are important to people when considering having children. Among the top five were the cost of raising children, the security of their or their partner’s job, the cost of housing, having someone to love, and their age. Taken together, these components provide insight into the issues that Australian parents and
prospective parents face when considering having a child, and what measures can be considered to support parenting. In a setting like Australia, where it is usual and expected that parents are involved in both paid work and raising of children, supportive family policies are needed to prevent a rapid decline in fertility.
... Empirical evidence on the impact of paternity leave on women employment is mixed. For example, while Amarson and Mitra find a positive impact in Iceland, other studies find no such impact (see for example, Cools et al. 2015, Rege and Solli 2013, Ekberg et al. 2013and Mansdotter et al. 2007). ...
... It provides detailed data on seven indicators that affect women's economic opportunities across the world. We focus on the data on paternity and shared parental leave provisions (Kluve and Tamm, 2013;Kluve and Schmitz, 2014;Cools et al., 2015). Shared parental leave policies are essential in our case because they influence the choices women face during their career trajectory and the opportunities available to them. ...
This paper examines the role of information and regulatory interventions in mitigating the executive gender pay gap. We find female executives receive about 34% less compared to equivalent males from the same cohort, which falls by half over tenure within the company, but remains systematically significant throughout. The gender pay gap is the highest for young female executives and in the financial sector. Both demand-side (board gender quotas) and supply-side (family policies) regulatory interventions are associated with a lower gender gap in executive pay. Board gender quotas are associated with lower gender pay gap for experienced female executives in the highest age bracket. In contrast, supply-side interventions are associated with lower gender pay gap for the youngest female executives. Our results have important implications for the relative effectiveness of public policies that aim to reduce gender imbalance in corporate leadership and pay.
... Parental leave policies, in particular, have the potential to have an immediate effect on fathers' involvement in childcare, helping to reduce the burdens often placed primarily on mothers (Ciccia & Verloo, 2012). When fathers take parental leave they are more likely to share childcare (Evertsson et al., 2018;Petts & Knoester, 2018;Pragg & Knoester, 2017), their children have better outcomes (Cools et al., 2015;Huerta et al., 2014), and their partners do better in the labor market (Andersen, 2018;Evertsson & Duvander, 2011). Patnaik (2019) argues that paternity leave offers a 'win-win' by increasing investment in children and gender equality. ...
Due to the lack of a federal paid parental leave policy in the United States, access to leave for most US workers is dependent on whether their employer offers paid leave. Our research explores employer-based access to parental leave among Fortune 500 companies. We develop a classification of leave policies based on how policies differ for mothers and fathers: gender equal (equal periods of leave to mothers and fathers), gender modified (equal leave of 6 or more weeks with an additional 6–8 weeks for mothers), gender unequal (mothers offered 2 or more times longer leave than fathers), and gender-neutral gendering (policies that offer primary and secondary caregiver leave). We find that 72% of companies offer some paid parental leave, and the majority of Fortune 500 companies have paid parental leave policies that offer substantially more leave to mothers than to fathers. We also find that technology companies, larger companies, and companies headquartered in a state with paid family leave are more likely to offer paid parental leave. This research provides insight into the degree to which employer policies may contribute to gender inequality and has implications for employer-mediated inequalities in access to parental leave.
... Positive father involvement brings great advantages to children (O'Brien, 2009;Romero-Baisas, 2015), to men as fathers (Smith, 2011), to the whole family (Cools, 2015;Rehel, 2014) and the society (Dermott, 2001). Despite the importance and growing attention to fathers' use of paternity leave, parental leave is such a rare case for many countries, and there is still significant variation in allowances and benefits and outcomes in different settings (Kaufman, 2017, p. 2). ...
Paternity leave is integral to transition to parenting and father-children bonding, providing fathers the necessary time to take part in an equal share of household labour. Still, policy legislation on paternity leave from work for fathers is not prevalent; therefore, there exists no comprehensive review of their potential impacts and benefits to guide educational and psychological research in this area. This systematic review aims to acknowledge the extent to which different paternal leave for fathers is studied, focusing on the shifts in the trends of the inquiry of the fathers' leave based on time, study location, research context, and sampling by addressing this gap. Methods A systemic review of peer-reviewed literature retrieved from electronic databases was conducted. A total of 1993 abstracts were included for the study and selected 141 published papers from 1990 to 2019 on the use of paternal leave were reviewed. The main findings were coded and analysed through NVIVO 12. Results The synthesis of the results suggested that there has been growing interest in paid parental leave regarding fathers in particular over time. The findings showed that the focus was on the effects of paternity leave on the transition to parenting and gender equality.
... 4 Paternal leave has also been associated with improved maternal health outcomes, improved childhood educational outcomes, lower rates of divorce, and improved paternal engagement in the child-parent relationship. [9][10][11] While there is the impression that taking parental leave has a negative effect on a physician's career and colleagues, physicians view their colleagues taking leave less negatively. 12 Institutional culture also likely plays a significant role in how physicians view the impact of parental leave. ...
Background
In recent decades, the gender makeup of Canadian medical residents has approached parity. As residency training years coincide closely with childbearing years and paid parental leave is associated with numerous benefits for both parents and children, it is important for there to be clarity about parental leave benefits.
Objectives
We aimed to conduct a comprehensive review of maternity and parental leave policies in all residency education programs in Canada, to highlight gaps that might be improved or areas in which Canadian programs excel.
Methods
We searched websites of the 8 provincial housestaff organizations (PHOs) for information regarding pregnancy workload accommodations, maternity leave, and parental leave policies in each province in effect as of January 2020. We summarized the policies and analyzed their readability using the Flesch Reading Ease.
Results
All Canadian PHOs provide specific accommodations around maternity and parental leave for medical residents. All organizations offer at least 35 weeks of total leave, while only 3 PHOs offer extended leave of about 63 weeks, in line with federal regulations. All but 2 PHOs offer supplemental income to their residents, although not for the full duration of offered leave. All PHOs offer workplace accommodations for pregnant residents in their second and/or third trimester.
Conclusions
Although all provinces had some form of leave, significant variability was found in the accommodations, duration of leave, and financial benefits provided to medical residents on maternity and parental leave across Canada. There is a lack of clarity in policy documents, which may be a barrier to optimal uptake.
... Nonetheless, a growing literature from across the OECD points in many cases toward positive effects. Several quasi-experimental studies find that the introduction of a fathers-only leave increases leave take-up by men (see, for example, Cools, Fiva, & Kirkebøen, 2015;Kluve & Tamm, 2009;Patnaik, 2018). In Sweden, for instance, the introduction and subsequent expansion of a "father quota" led not only to increases in the number of fathers using any leave, but also to a steady and sustained increase in the share of days used by men (Duvander & Johansson, 2012;Ekberg, Eriksson, & Friebel, 2013). ...
Families are a cornerstone of society. Families and the way they function have huge effects on the well-being of their members. Families provide social support networks, offering love, care and friendship. They also play an important economic role in the production of household goods, and provide protection against hardship. Families are also a source of economic and social externalities that have major effects on wider society. For example, it is individual adults who decide when and how to establish formal partnerships and when and how to have children. These choices are important to family members themselves, but also have implications for countries as a whole; today's birth rates strongly influence the size of the future labor force, for instance, with knock-on effects on future economic performance, tax revenue and the sustainability of social protection systems. In addition, family decisions vary with the socioeconomic
status and contribute to the transmission of inequalities from one
generation to the next.
This chapter first provides an overview of changes in family and work
behaviours. It highlights the diversification of family models and points to
the inequalities associated with these changes. It then presents how policies
have developed to reconcile work and family commitments and reduce
gender inequality, with results that can vary with the socio-economic status
of families. An important challenge remains to better support the most
vulnerable families and address the inequalities that are widening with the
transformation of family living arrangements.
... Highly educated men are more likely to take parental leave than their less educated counterparts (Duvander and Johansson, 2016)-a practice associated with wage losses that are steeper for the more educated (Albrecht et al., 1999;Evertsson, 2016). Fathers' leave has been linked to reduced income inequality within couples in both Sweden (Johansson, 2010) and Denmark (Andersen, 2018), although not in Norway (Cools, Fiva and Kirkebøen, 2011). Further, men's contributions to housework and childcare have increased more rapidly among the more highly educated over time (Sullivan, Billari and Altintas, 2014). ...
This article applies a couple perspective to assessing gender inequality in Sweden—a setting with high maternal labour force participation, a long history of family policy investment, and strong norms of gender equality. We address open questions about how couples’ earnings following parenthood have changed over time, and how patterns of inequality in couples’ earnings have played out across educational groups. Our study uses fixed effects methods and register data covering the total population of heterosexual couples giving birth in Sweden between 1987 and 2007 (N = 587,414 couples). It examines change in the female partner’s share of total couple earnings from 2 years before to 8 years after first birth across parent cohorts differentiated by his and her education. Women’s earnings share declines steeply following birth, across all groups. Results show modestly smaller declines among parents in the latest cohort in the year directly following childbirth. Change is most pronounced among couples with a highly educated female partner, and it appears driven by a marked dip in fathers’ earnings that is new to this recent generation of men. Recent movement towards within-couple equality in Sweden appears driven by men’s work adjustments, pointing to an important shift in the allocation of care work within couples.
... As Hass and Hwang (1999: 49) report, "Parental leave is seen as guaranteeing that people can have children and return to their jobs without adverse consequences, thus ensuring children's wellbeing." Offering equal, protected, and flexible leave enhances both mothers' and fathers' caretaking capacity with respect to their preferences, resulting in better cognitive and physical health outcomes for children (Cools, Fiva, & Kirkeboen 2015). Both parents are protected from having to make strict tradeoffs between work and family. ...
Across high and low-income countries alike, paid parental leave has been identified for its strong potential to improve health outcomes for both children and parents and to reduce economic and gendered inequality (Heyman et al. 2017). This review will evaluate the welfare arguments for extending equitable leave rights to fathers in order to improve family wellbeing and related sustainable development outcomes. Using Amartya Sen's capabilities approach and Martin Seligman's PERMA indicator model for mental and emotional wellbeing as complementary frameworks, I analyze how gender-inclusive leave policies, as opposed to mother-only and gender-neutral leave, enable happier and more capable families while also advancing economic prosperity and gender equality. In particular this paper will focus on 2030 Sustainable Development Goals 3, 5, and 8-good health and wellbeing, gender equality, and decent work and economic growth. My results find that the inclusion of equitable leave for fathers in paternity leave schemes enables families to 'be and do' more, more happily when parents are able to choose who works and who cares for their child amongst themselves.
... Studies show that fathers' take-up rates are lower than mothers' and the duration typically short (Bunning 2015;Petts, Knoester, and Li 2020;Pragg and Knoester 2017). Research finds that taking leaves do noes not substantively impact fathers' employment or workhours (Cools, Fiva, and Kirkebøen 2015;Haas and Rostgaard 2011), although some studies find declines in workhours (Duvander and Jans 2009). In the United States, research finds that California's paid leave policy increased fathers' take-up (Bartel et al. 2018). ...
The birth of a new child continues to exacerbate gender specialization among different-sex couples. This study considers the potential of paid leave policies to intervene in this key life-course juncture and promote more gender egalitarian divisions of paid and unpaid work. While previous research has examined the impact of paid leave policies on paid or unpaid work among mothers or fathers separately, this is the first study to examine comprehensively how these benefits shape both mothers and fathers and both paid and unpaid work outcomes. I use data from the Current Population Survey 1990-2020 and the American Time Use Survey 2003-2019 and quasi-experimental differences-in-differences models to examine the impact of the introduction of paid leave policies in California and New Jersey on paid and unpaid work outcomes among different-sex couples. I find that change was modest and uneven. California and New Jersey paid leave policies declined mothers’ and fathers paid work after new births, increased mothers’ care work but not fathers’, and increased fathers’ housework but not mothers’. On the whole, paid leave policies appear to have helped support mothers’ primary caregiver role while simultaneously encouraging a more gender egalitarian division of housework.
... For example, findings for first births show that a gender gap in unpaid labor that was not present before the birth emerges immediately after entering parenthood, even among couples with egalitarian values (Nitsche and Grunow 2016;Yavorsky, Kamp Dush, and Schoppe-Sullivan 2015). Reserved paternity leave for fathers has been shown to increase fathers' engagement with their children (Cools, Fiva, and Kirkeboen 2015;Wray 2020) and reduce the mental health costs of childbearing (Persson and Rossin-Slater 2019). However, these changes are often short-lived and depend on the relative duration and type of reserved paternity leave (Bünning 2015;Schober and Zoch 2019). ...
... Although this report focuses on Sweden, I would like to expand the already elusive picture of impacts on male careers by summarizing three Norwegian studies on this topic. Firstly, in a study that mainly investigates the causal effects of men's parental leave on children's school performance and outcomes with regard to the labour market and the family, Cools, Fiva and Johannessen Kirkebøen (2011) report that they can neither dismiss nor verify the hypothesis that fathers' working hours or earnings are affected by men's parental leave uptake. ...
This report takes its points of departure in Sweden and, more specifically, in research on parental leave for fathers in Sweden. It summarizes and draws upon selected publications written in English, Swedish, and – in a few cases – Norwegian. It contributes to the Austrian research project ‘Paternity leave: Impacts on male careers’ by presenting previous research and discussing crucial political, societal, and research concerns related to men’s parental leave in Sweden. Its aim is to give an account of policies, attitudes and practices related to parental leave for fathers in contemporary Sweden.
... En particulier, avec l'offre de nouvelles allocations aux familles, de services éducatifs de garde universels et à frais minimes pour les parents [Haeck et al. (2015)] et l'instauration d'un meilleur régime d'assurance parentale (Régime québécois d'assurance parentale (RQAP) en 2006), le gouvernement québécois affichait par des effets de pairs ("peer effects") jouant sur la banalisation de la prise de congés par les pères et pouvant réduire les stéréotypes de genre qui pénalisent les femmes sur le marché du travail [Vallières (2016)]. Toutefois, d'autres études ne trouvent aucun effet significatif sur l'engagement des pères dans les responsabilités parentales et domestiques [Hosking et al. (2010), Kluve and Tamm (2013), Cools et al. (2015)], et surtout on observe que lorsque les congés ne leur sont pas réservés (ou obligatoires), les pères y recourent très peu. 9. En 1997, la plus qu'aucune étude, ni pour le cas du Québec, ni même au niveau international, n'a encore apporté de réponse empirique à cette problématique. ...
Ce travail doctoral en économie appliquée propose une analyse des comportements individuels en matière de protection sociale, dans le contexte de la santé et plus généralement de la gestion du capital humain. Le chapitre 1 analyse l'effet du niveau de couverture assurantielle sur la consommation individuelle de soins dans le contexte français, en tenant compte de la dimension comportementale. A partir de données d’enquête, ce travail met en avant le rôle majeur de l’aversion au risque sur la nature de la relation observée entre le niveau de garanties des contrats de complémentaire santé et le niveau de dépenses de soins des assurés. Les chapitres 2 et 3 étudient l'arbitrage individuel entre assurance et prévention, à partir d’une étude expérimentale. Le chapitre 2 révèle tout d’abord une incohérence dynamique des choix des participants, qui se traduit par une diminution de la demande d'assurance avec à l’introduction d’un mécanisme de prévention, sans pour autant induire davantage d'efforts préventifs ensuite. Le chapitre 3 met quant à lui en avant le rôle de la liberté de choix en assurance sur le niveau d’effort de prévention consenti par les assurés : le fait de laisser le choix du contrat aux participants diminue le niveau d’effort de prévention qu’ils sont prêts à fournir ensuite, à niveau de couverture donné. Le chapitre 4 analyse l'impact des conditions de travail sur le recours aux arrêts maladie des salariés français. A partir de données d’enquête, enrichies de variables concernant les conditions d'indemnisation individuelles en cas d'absence, il révèle notamment l'existence de disparités dans les comportements d'arrêts maladie et l'état de santé général entre les travailleurs exposés à certains facteurs de pénibilité et ceux qui ne le sont pas, avec un rôle majeur joué par les risques psychosociaux. Enfin, le chapitre 5 propose la première évaluation de l’effet causal de la générosité des prestations familiales versées en cas de congé parental à la suite d’une naissance sur la durée du congé demandée par les mères les plus modestes. En utilisant l’approche par Regression Kink Design (RKD), mise en œuvre sur des données administratives et fiscales québécoises, ce travail confirme l’effet positif attendu de la générosité des prestations familiales versées aux mères à faible revenu sur la durée du congé parental qu'elles demandent, avec un effet plus marqué pour les mères monoparentales.
... Slechts 44,6% van de respondenten is voorstander van meer ouderschapsverlof voor koppels waar de partners dit verlof gelijkmatiger verdelen en slechts een nipte meerderheid (53,8%) is voorstander om het geboorteverlof voor vaders uit te breiden van 10 naar 20 dagen. De laatste hervorming werd opgenomen in het regeerakkoord van de Belgische federale regering De Croo I. Uit Noors onderzoek blijkt nochtans dat meer vaderschapsverlof bijdraagt aan een gelijkere verdeling van huishoudtaken en zelfs aan betere schoolprestaties van de kinderen (Kotsadam & Finseraas, 2011;Cools, Fiva, & Kirkebøen, 2015). Daarnaast is het opvallend dat bij beide hervormingen vrouwen hier meer voorstander zijn dan mannen. ...
Dit artikel gebruikt resultaten van een survey van zowel een toevalssteekproef (N = 500) als een gemakssteekproef (N = 2919) bij meerderjarige Vlamingen om het draagvlak voor 24 potentiële arbeidsmarkthervormingen na te gaan. Enerzijds tonen de resultaten aan dat er een groot draagvlak is voor (aangemoedigde én verplichte) opleiding en gemeenschapsdienst voor werklozen en voor de jobbonus. Allemaal maatregelen die gepland zijn door de Vlaamse Regering Jambon I. Anderzijds is er een klein draagvlak voor hervormingen die – de nochtans erg gewenste – verhoging van het minimumpensioen naar 1500 euro netto realistisch moeten maken, zoals het uitfaseren van het brugpensioen, het minder afhankelijk maken van pensioenopbouw van gelijkgestelde periodes en het (gedeeltelijk) ontkoppelen van lonen en anciënniteit. Dit maakt duidelijk dat de eindeloopbaandiscussie die de Belgische federale regering De Croo I wil voeren geen evidente opdracht wordt. Voor het geplande opvoeren van de strijd tegen sociale en fiscale fraude is er wel een groot draagvlak. Een enigszins verrassend klein draagvlak is er voor maatregelen die de positie van de vrouw op de arbeidsmarkt beogen te versterken: quota voor vrouwen in raden van bestuur van privébedrijven, meer ouderschapsverlof voor koppels waar de partners dit verlof gelijkmatiger verdelen en een uitbreiding van het geboorteverlof voor vaders van tien naar twintig dagen.
... Further to this, a few studies offer a causal analysis of fathers' uptake of leave on fertility based on quasi-natural experiments made possible by reforms in fathers' leave policy. Two studies, each by Cools et al. (2015) and Hart et al. (2019) find no evidence that paternity leave affects fertility in Norway. A recent publication by Duvander et al. (2020) similarly finds that the introduction of father's leave quotas did not affect fertility in Norway while it finds a positive but temporary effect only on third-birth risks for lower-income couples in Sweden. ...
While many countries with low birth rates have implemented policies incentivizing fathers to take parental leave with the anticipation that it will contribute to raising birth rates, there is scant research empirically testing whether fathers’ uptake of leave is pronatalist. Existing research is limited to a few European (mostly Nordic) countries, and it is unclear whether there exists a positive causal relationship. Using mixed methods, this paper seeks to explore the processes and mechanisms by which fathers’ uptake of parental leave impacts intentions for additional children in South Korea, a country characterized by lowest-low fertility and low but rapidly expanding uptake of leave by fathers. Results based on multinomial logistic regression models suggest that in comparison to fathers who expect to take their first leave shortly, fathers with leave experience are less likely to report couple-level intentions for another child, significantly so at parity two. Interviews of fathers with parental leave experience confirm that fathers attenuate their fertility intentions downwards in light of the difficulties of childcare during their leave. While these intentions may change further down the line and/or couples may decide to continue an unplanned pregnancy, results suggest that fathers’ parental leave has an anti- rather than pronatalist effect in South Korea. This study demonstrates that in countries with poor support for the reconciliation of employment and childcare, equalizing the gendered division of parental leave may not be sufficient to see a reversal in its fertility trends.
... Goldin 2006) and family time. A new and growing academic literature sets the focus on understanding various aspects of the interaction between fathers and children such as effects on peer behavior (Dahl et al. 2014) and child outcomes (Cools et al. 2015). 6 The group of men and boys has also gained interest since it seems that more recently it is men who are falling behind (see Autor and Wasserman 2013). ...
This study investigates the effect of children on male earnings and how earnings inequality among men arises over the life cycle. We use panel register data on earnings and fertility for sibling brothers and twins, and present estimates from flexible earnings regressions. We find that OLS estimates are confounded by selection effects through family fixed factors. The comparison of twin brothers shows that overall earnings growth does not vary between those who ever become fathers and those remaining childless, and there is no significant effect of children on earnings. We also show that controls for marriage explain only a relatively small part of the effect of children. Men who remain childless and unmarried are on relatively low earnings profiles and therefore contribute significantly to the earnings inequality among men.
... Fathers who took the paternity leave usually did this when the child was about 10 months old, an age when a child forms attachments. The leave affected the evolution of parents' roles in the household: It increased paternal care for the children 15 years later (Cools, Fiva, Kirkeboen 2015). The Norwegian provision exercised all three functions of law: (i) the command function -firms were required to offer the quota of paternity leave, (ii) the expressive function -the law expressed as a social value that a father should bear some child care responsibility, and (iii) the schematizing function-the experience of paternity leave had a durable effect on gender roles in the household and on beliefs about what a "good father" is (gender schemas). ...
... International studies have shown that shorter non-earmarked parental leave periods increase the return to work for women, and that longer parental leave periods may increase the risk of negative effects on employment and earnings (Kalb 2018). These effects have been found to be stronger among mothers with little or no education (Broadway et al. 2016 (Johansson 2010, Duvander and Johansson 2015, Andersen 2016) but not in Norway (Cools et al. 2015, Hart et al. 2016). ...
We investigate whether paying fathers to stay at home with their newborn child affects marital stability. Our empirical analysis is based on a reform in Iceland that offered one month of parental leave earmarked to fathers with a child born on or after January 2001. This reform created substantial economic incentives for fathers to be more involved in caring for their children during their first months of life, and the take-up rate in the first year was 82.4%. We apply a regression discontinuity framework to assess the effect of this reform on the probability of separation among couples and find that parents who are entitled to paternity leave are less likely to separate. The effect persists throughout the first fifteen years after the child is born. Interestingly, the paternity leave has the strongest impact among couples where mother has higher, or equal, educational attainment to that of the father.
The two main goals of this chapter are, first, to understand, review and critically examine why working fathers are also a group with specific needs when they return to work after having a child, and second, to present and discuss practical recommendations. To achieve these aims, the chapter has been divided into four sections. In the first part, we present how the changing nature of fatherhood, together with the notion of the ideal worker, generates a feeling of confusion and ambivalence among working fathers. In the second part, three reasons why fathers should be considered as a specific group are presented. The third section discusses how equality-promoting policies (individual, non-transferrable and paid) are necessary to reverse the current situation, to transform inequality and to allow men to fully develop themselves as fathers. Finally, practical recommendations are provided for scholars, organizations and governments.
A variety of civic actors—government, associations, and local agencies—work to help parents advance the vitality of our youngest children. Empirical findings accumulating over the past half‐century identify benefits for infants and toddlers stemming from three policy models: paid leave for parents after a newborn arrives; regular pediatric assessments, including home visiting; and quality caregivers situated in homes or centers. We review what is known about the effects of these policies, along with constituent elements of quality (mediators) that operate proximal to children's health, cognitive, and emotional growth. Much has been learned about how such collective action, carried out by local organizations, advance infant–toddler development. Methodological advances foster new knowledge: moving closer to causal inferences and pinpointing social mechanisms that enrich infant–toddler settings. Less well understood is how policy levers can move the malleable elements of program quality to raise the magnitude or sustainability of program effects. We note the benefits of income‐support efforts for fragile families, while urging new work on how economic dynamics touch the capacity of parents and caregivers to better nurture infants and toddlers.
The Netherlands performs well on many measures of gender equality, but the country faces a persistent equality challenge between women and men: the high share of women in part‑time jobs. Nearly 60% of women in the Dutch labour market work part‑time, roughly three times the OECD average for women, and over three times the rate for Dutch men. The Netherlands’ gender gap in hours worked contributes to the gender gap in earnings, the gender gap in pensions, women’s slower progression into management roles, and the unequal division of unpaid work at home. These gaps typically widen with parenthood, as mothers often reduce hours in the labour market to take on more unpaid care work at home. The Dutch government must redouble its efforts to achieve gender equality. Better social policy support can
help level the playing field between men and women, contribute to more egalitarian norms around the division of work, and foster more gender‑equal behaviour in paid and unpaid work in the Netherlands. See, http://oe.cd/pub/gender-netherlands-2019
While it is believed that child allowances can improve fertility in principle, this paper shows that the effects of child allowances with gender discrimination should be reconsidered. It points out that gender wage discrimination can inhibit the positive effects of child allowances on fertility. With high gender wage discrimination, assuming that both parental time and market childcare goods are indispensable for childrearing, child allowances significantly increase maternal childcare time. On the other hand, child allowances also reduce childcare expenditure due to the decline in female labor time and increase in the relative price of market childcare goods, which eventually decreases fertility. We show that when the gender discrimination factor is greater than a certain cutoff, the effects of child allowances on fertility become negative. Moreover, male childcare time also plays an essential role in increasing fertility rates. Therefore, gender equality is a prerequisite for increased child allowances to be effective.
Low fertility is set to worsen economic problems in many developed countries, and maternity, paternity, and parental leave have emerged as key pro-natal policies. Gender inequity in the balance of domestic and formal work has been identified as a key driver of low fertility, and leave can potentially equalise this balance and thereby promote fertility. However, the literature contends that evidence for the effect of leave on fertility is mixed. We conduct the first systematic review on this topic. By applying a rigorous search protocol, we identify and review empirical studies that quantify the impact of leave policies on fertility. We focus on experimental or quasi-experimental studies that can identify causal effects. We identify 11 papers published between 2009 and 2019, evaluating 23 policy changes across Europe and North America from 1977 to 2009. Results are a mixture of positive, negative, and null impacts on fertility. To explain these apparent inconsistencies, we extend the conceptual framework of Lalive and Zweimüller (2009), which decomposes the total effect of leave on fertility into the “current-child” and “future-child” effects. We decompose these into effects on women at different birth orders, and specify types of study design to identify each effect. We classify the 23 studies in terms of the type of effect identified, revealing that all the negative or null studies identify the current-child effect, and all the positive studies identify the future-child or total effect. Since the future-child and total effects are more important for promoting aggregate fertility, our findings show that leave does in fact increase fertility when benefit increases are generous. Furthermore, our extensions to Lalive and Zweimüller’s conceptual framework provide a more sophisticated way of understanding and classifying the effects of pro-natal policies on fertility. Additionally, we propose ways to adapt the ROBINS-I tool for evaluating risk of bias in pro-natal policy studies.
Objective
This study aims to explore how equitable paternity leave policy may combine with other family policy to impact fertility levels.
Background
The decision to start a family is personal but takes place in the context of policies that vary in level of support. Although policies offering fathers paid leave from work are expected to promote gender equity and make family formation easier, these policies have been implemented with little evidence of effectiveness.
Method
This study uses fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to study data from the International Labour Organization, the World Bank, and the International Leave Network to compare policies systematically across 43 countries.
Results
Employing the paternity leave equity typology, evidence suggests that high increases in fertility are found in countries where paternity leave policies promote equity in combination with other factors, or in less affluent countries where women tend to start families later and experience less paid labor market participation.
Conclusion
This research suggests that a one‐size‐fits‐all approach may not promote fertility.
Implications
In addition to equity in parental leave, policymakers should consider a range of factors that affect parents, especially women's participation in the workforce and age at first birth. Further research is needed to identify conditions in which equitable paternity leaves are most effective so policymakers can develop evidence‐based policies best suited to meeting their goals.
With the advance of the gender revolution, income dynamics in couples are changing. Nonetheless, in most Western societies, parenthood still promotes specialized gender roles. Utilizing Norwegian register data on all married and cohabiting couples born 1946–1989, we investigate possible changes in the associations between parenthood and within-couple inequality in earnings in the years 2005–2014. Precisely, using interactions and fixed effects models, we compare the development of within-couple gender gaps in earnings over time between childless couples and couples with children of different ages, and within couples before and after childbirth. Results showed that the gender gap in earnings in couples increased with the number of children and was most distinct among couples with children below 6 years. However, the association between parenthood and within-couple inequality in earnings was reduced across the study period, a development partly driven by a decreasing fatherhood premium evident from 2009 onwards. Not only women’s but also men’s income development is now negatively affected by having young children in the household. Our findings, thus, indicate important changes in how men and women prioritize paid labour after a childbirth.
Objective
The aim of the study was to examine whether gender equality‐focused parental benefits affect the union stability of couples.
Background
Generous, flexible, and gender equality‐focused parental benefits have been shown to increase fathers' use of parental leave and time with children. Even though these policies have no explicit aims regarding relationship stability, two longstanding theoretical perspectives (traditionalist and egalitarian) offer potential mechanisms through which this type of policy can shift relationship dynamics either to increase or to decrease union dissolution.
Method
Using Canadian administrative data, we estimate difference‐in‐differences and local average treatment effects to examine the effects of the Québec Parental Insurance Plan (QPIP 2006) on union dissolution. Then we examine whether the policy had heterogenous effects on couples which are likely to be either traditional or egalitarian.
Results
We find that QPIP decreased the separation rate by half of a percentage point overall, a 6% decrease. The greatest reductions in union dissolution are found among couples likely to be more egalitarian in orientation.
Conclusion
The large negative effects of this family policy on union dissolution are significant, as they show one clear way in which family policies can encourage egalitarianism and stabilize families during the second phase of the gender revolution.
The birth of a new child continues to exacerbate gender specialization among different-sex couples. This study considers the potential of paid leave policies to intervene in this key life-course juncture and promote greater gender equality in paid and unpaid work. While previous research has examined the impact of paid leave policies on paid or unpaid work among mothers or fathers separately, this study provides an integrated framework and examines comprehensively how these benefits shape both mothers' and fathers' paid and unpaid work outcomes. I use data from the Current Population Survey 1990–2020 and the American Time Use Survey 2003–2019 and quasi-experimental differences-in-differences models to examine the impact of the introduction of paid leave policies in California and New Jersey. The results show that the policy increased mothers’ and fathers’ short-term time off from paid work after new births, increased mothers’ care work more than fathers’, and increased fathers’ housework more than mothers’. I call this pattern differentiated egalitarianism, denoting changes increasing men’s involvement in housework while simultaneously reproducing mothers’ primary caregiver role.
Generous government-mandated parental leave is generally viewed as an effective policy to support women’s careers around childbirth. But does it help women to reach top positions in the upper pay echelon of their firms? Using longitudinal employer–employee matched data for the entire Norwegian population, we address this question exploiting a series of reforms that expanded paid leave from 30 weeks in 1989 to 52 weeks in 1993. The representation of women in top positions has only moderately increased over time, and career profiles of female top earners within firms are significantly different from those of their male counterparts. The reforms did not affect, and possibly decreased, the probability for women to be at the top over their life cycle. We discuss some implications of this result to put into perspective the design of new family-friendly policy interventions.
Using cross-national data from the 2012 International Social Survey Programme (N = 33,273), this study considers institutional, self-interest, and ideational factors in analyzing public opinions about the provision, length, and source of paid parental leave offerings for fathers. We find substantial support for generous leave offerings. Multilevel regression results reveal that being a woman, supporting dual-earning expectations, and realizing more family strains lead to support for more generous leave offerings. Endorsing separate spheres and intensive mothering attitudes reduces support for more generous leave offerings; although, gendered attitudes interact with one another in predicting leave preferences, too. Finally, country-level indicators of female empowerment and father-specific leave offerings are positively associated with preferences for more generous leave offerings. Overall, public opinions about fathers’ leave offerings across OECD countries largely support policies that provide opportunities for more involved fathering, but preferences continue to be gendered and linked to family strains and country-level contexts.
We conducted the first experimental tests of the impact of men's access to paid parental leave on anticipated well‐being among heterosexual men and women in the United States. Participants read a news article reporting that paid paternity leave was either likely or unlikely in the United States in the near future, completed a future life‐brainstorming task designed to make this scenario more salient, and reported anticipated outcomes pertaining to well‐being (predicted relationship satisfaction, positive and negative emotions, and life satisfaction). Results from an online sample (Experiment 1, N = 694) revealed that both men and women predicted more positive outcomes when they believed paid paternity leave would (vs. would not) exist. In contrast, results from students (Experiment 2, N = 199) revealed that women predicted better outcomes in the leave (vs. no leave) condition, while men predicted consistently positive outcomes regardless of condition. Looking at the interaction the other way, paternity leave closed a gender gap in anticipated well‐being favoring men. Exploratory analyses revealed that students anticipated increased relationship gender equality in division of labor as a result of paternity leave, but only in gender counter‐stereotypic domains (i.e., paid work outside the home for women; unpaid childcare and housework for men).
We explore the effects of parental leave entitlements for mothers and fathers on wages and employment. We consider male and female workers who compete for the same jobs in a labor search and matching model with endogenous job search and leave take-up rates. We identify key theoretical effects and calibrate the model to simulate policy changes in France, Italy, Norway and Portugal. Reducing the gap in parental leave entitlements reduces gender wage gaps and increases gender employment rate gaps in these countries. Leave take-up rates increase with paid leave duration. In general, we find that job search intensity decreases when longer paid leave duration decreases wages.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed, but did not create, the caregiving crisis in the United States: for most people, it was already a major ordeal to provide reproductive labor. The caregiving crisis was less visible before the pandemic because it was suffered unequally, in part due to the different positions of American women. Some women paid other women to do care work, women received differing sets of benefits from federal and state governments, and some women got far more support from their employers than did others. Pandemic-induced shocks, including the closure of K–12 schools and childcare centers, and reduced access to domestic workers and elder care workers, seemed to have triggered a closer alignment of perspectives and interests among diverse women. Although women’s demands for support seem to have pushed the Biden administration to propose more expansive family policies, stereotypes and norms that marginalize care work and care workers within families and across the economy also need to change to achieve equality for women.
This article quantifies the relative effectiveness of childcare subsidies and subsidies on grandmothers’ time on married mothers’ employment and fertility rates, paying special attention to heterogeneous effects. A heterogeneous agent model, populated by married households who make decisions related to labour supply and fertility, and the Spanish economy are used as a benchmark for calibration. The results indicate that childcare subsidies conditional on employment are more effective than subsidies on grandmothers’ time to foster the participation of married mothers in the labour force. However, they induce women to work fewer hours, unless after-school hours are also subsidised. This overtime subsidy is also necessary for the fertility rate to increase, but it implies a significant adjustment in tax rates to maintain the same fiscal balance. If the aim is simply to raise the employment rate of mothers of children aged 2 years or younger, then subsidising childcare costs only is more effective because the fiscal effort is lower. Regarding the heterogeneous effects, in all the policies studied, the growth in female employment is mainly accounted for by the behaviour of women without tertiary education while that of fertility is accounted for by women with tertiary education. Considerations related to inequality and distributional effects of these policies would also seem to favour childcare subsidies versus subsidies on grandmothers’ time.
Test if an extended paternity quota impacts couples' division of leave and paid work, and if these changes influence union stability, marriage propensity, and further childbearing. Influential empirical and theoretical works have linked unequal division of household and paid work to increasing divorce rates and falling fertility. This suggests that paternity quota reforms may affect family dynamics if they facilitate more time alone for a father and his young child. We analyze an extension of the Norwegian parental leave father's quota from 6 to 10 weeks with a regression discontinuity design. Full population data of parents of children born in a 4‐month window around the reform are drawn from Norwegian administrative registers (N = 9757). The reform significantly increased the amount of leave taken by fathers and reduced the amount of leave taken by mothers, while his and her subsequent earnings were unmoved. Neither union stability, fertility nor cohabiters' propensity to marry were affected by the change in leave uptake. The reform succeeded in changing the division of paid parental leave between parents. However, these changes did not translate into changes in earnings, family stability, or parity progression. This suggests that policies that induce fathers to spend more time with their young child do not move the “stalled” gender revolution along.
Fertility in Taiwan has been persistently low since 2003. Theorists have attributed this to gender inequity in domestic labour, yet this relationship has not been statistically tested. We assess the way in which the division of housework influences the probability of having an additional child. We assess this relationship for a sample of childbearing-aged married couples, as well as for education- and employment-specific subgroups. We find evidence of impacts for university-educated and working-mother couples, and when survey respondents are wives rather than husbands. The probability of a university-educated and working-mother couple with an equal division of housework having a child within five years is 0.73, whereas the probability of a couple with the mean division of housework having a child is 0.39. This finding is significant at the 1 per cent level.
Return to work is one of the most significant barriers to breastfeeding (BF). Family-friendly policies are critical to ensure that BF and maternal work are not mutually exclusive. This study aims to determine contextual factors and underlying mechanisms influencing the implementation of workplace policies in Mexico. Following a qualitative approach, the study was conducted in the following four cities in Mexico: Mérida, Chihuahua, Guadalajara, and Monterrey. Interviews were conducted in 14 workplaces, and included 49 (potential) beneficiaries, 41 male employees, and 21 managers and human resources personnel. The information collected was analyzed through a deductive thematic analysis and mapped against the Context-Mechanism-Outcome framework of Breastfeeding Interventions at the Workplace. Contextual factors influencing a BF-friendly environment in the workplace were as follows: work-schedule flexibility, provision of lactation services (i.e., BF counseling) other than a lactation room, women’s previous experience with BF and family-friendly environments in the workplace. The underlying mechanisms enabling/impeding a BF-friendly environment at the workplace were as follows: awareness of Mexican maternity protection legislation, usage of BF interventions in the workplace, culture, supervisor/co-worker support and BF-friendly physical space. To achieve a BF-friendly environment in the workplace, actions at the level of public policy and workplaces must accompany adherence to Mexican legislation.
De notitie Vrouwen aan de top is een literatuurstudie: deze geeft de beschikbare, empirische kennis weer over vrouwen aan de top. Wat is de laatste stand van zaken, wat zijn oorzaken van het lage aandeel topvrouwen, wat zijn de gevolgen en welke beleidsopties hebben overheid en bedrijfsleven om meer vrouwen aan de top te krijgen?
We study whether free preschool affects the subsequent school performance of children from immigrant families. Our difference-in-differences approach takes advantage of a policy intervention implemented in two districts in Oslo, leaving other similar districts unaffected. The grade point average of girls increases more in the intervention districts than in the comparison districts, resulting in effect estimates of about a tenth of the standard deviation. We find no consistent effects for boys.
We study the impact of maternal care on early child development using an expansion in Canadian maternity leave entitlements. Following the leave expansion, mothers who took leave spent between 48 and 58 percent more time not working in the first year of their children's lives. We find that this extra maternal care primarily crowded out home-based care by unlicensed non-relatives, and replaced mostly full-time work. However, the estimates suggest a weak impact of the increase in maternal care on indicators of child development. Measures of family environment and motor-social development showed changes very close to zero. Some improvements in temperament were observed but occurred both for treated and untreated children.
This paper develops a covariate-based approach to the external validity of instrumental variables (IV) estimates. Assuming that differences in observed complier characteristics are what make IV estimates differ from one another and from parameters like the effect of treatment on the treated, we show how to construct estimates for new subpopulations from a given set of covariate-specific LATEs. We also develop a reweighting procedure that uses the traditional overidentification test statistic to define a population for which a given pair of IV estimates has external validity. These ideas are illustrated through a comparison of twins and sex-composition IV estimates of the effects childbearing on labor supply.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many states introduced grants for school districts offering kindergarten programs. This paper exploits the staggered timing of these initiatives to estimate the long-term effects of a large public investment in universal early education. I find that white children aged five after the typical state reform were less likely to be high school dropouts and had lower institutionalization rates as adults. I rule out similar positive effects for blacks, despite comparable increases in their enrollment in public kindergartens in response to the initiatives. The explanation for this finding that receives most empirical support is that state funding for kindergarten crowded out participation in federally-funded early education among the poorest five year olds.
We investigate the impact of maternity leave on the cognitive and behavioral development of children at ages 4 and 5. The impact is identified by legislated increases in the duration of maternity leave in Canada, which significantly increased the amount of maternal care children received in the second half of their first year. We carefully document how other observable inputs to child development vary across cohorts of children exposed to different maternity leave regimes. Our results indicate that maternity leave changes had no positive effect on indices of children’s cognitive and behavioral development. We uncover a small negative impact on PPVT and Who Am I? scores, which suggests the timing of the mother/child separation due to the mother’s return to work may be important.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
We study the impact on children of increasing maternity leave benefits using a reform that increased paid and unpaid maternity leave in Norway in July 1977. Mothers giving birth before this date were eligible only for 12 weeks of unpaid leave, while those giving birth after were entitled to 4 months of paid leave and 12 months of unpaid leave. This increased time with the child led to a 2.7 percentage points decline in high school dropout and a 5% increase in wages at age 30. For mothers with low education we find a 5.2 percentage points decline in high school dropout and an 8% increase in wages at age 30. The effect is especially large for children of those mothers who, prior to the reform, would take very low levels of unpaid leave.
This paper provides new evidence on the long-term benefits of Head Start using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. I compare siblings who differ in their participation in the program, controlling for a variety of pre-treatment covariates. I estimate that Head Start participants gain 0.23 standard deviations on a summary index of young adult outcomes. This closes one-third of the gap between children with median and bottom quartile family income, and is about 80 percent as large as model programs such as Perry Preschool. The long-term impact for disadvantaged children is large despite "fadeout" of test score gains. (JEL H52, J13, I28, I38)
From the mid-1960s to around 1980, Sweden extended its family policies that provide financial and in-kind support to families
with children very quickly. The benefits were closely tied to previous work experience. Thus, women born in the 1950s faced
markedly different incentives when making fertility choices compared to women born only 15–20 years earlier. This paper examines
the evolution of completed fertility patterns for Swedish women born in 1925–1958 and makes comparisons to women in neighbouring
countries where the policies were not extended as much as in Sweden. The results suggest that the extension of the policy
raised the level of fertility, shortened the spacing of births, and induced fluctuations in the period fertility rates, but
it did not change the negative relationship between women’s educational level and completed fertility.
This paper analyzes the effects of changes in the duration of paid, job-protected parental leave on mothers' higher-order fertility and post-birth labor market careers. Identification is based on a major Austrian reform increasing the duration of parental leave from one to two years for any child born on or after July 1, 1990. We find that mothers who gave birth to their first child immediately after the reform had more second children than pre-reform mothers, and that extended parental leave significantly reduced return-to-work. Employment and earnings also decrease in the short run but not in the long run. Fertility and work responses vary across the population in ways suggesting that both cash transfers and job protection are relevant. Increasing parental leave for a future child increases fertility strongly but leaves
short-run post birth careers relatively unaffected. Partially reversing the 1990 extension, a second 1996 reform improves employment and earnings while compressing the time between births.
The core methods in today's econometric toolkit are linear regression for statistical control, instrumental variables methods for the analysis of natural experiments, and differences-in-differences methods that exploit policy changes. In the modern experimentalist paradigm, these techniques address clear causal questions such as: Do smaller classes increase learning? Should wife batterers be arrested? How much does education raise wages?Mostly Harmless Econometricsshows how the basic tools of applied econometrics allow the data to speak.In addition to econometric essentials,Mostly Harmless Econometricscovers important new extensions--regression-discontinuity designs and quantile regression--as well as how to get standard errors right. Joshua Angrist and J rn-Steffen Pischke explain why fancier econometric techniques are typically unnecessary and even dangerous. The applied econometric methods emphasized in this book are easy to use and relevant for many areas of contemporary social science.An irreverent review of econometric essentialsA focus on tools that applied researchers use mostChapters on regression-discontinuity designs, quantile regression, and standard errorsMany empirical examplesA clear and concise resource with wide applications.
We study how the duration of paid parental leave affects the accumulation of cognitive skills among children. Using a reform which extended parental leave benefits from 12 to 15 months for Swedish children born after August 1988 we evaluate the effects of prolonged parental leave on children's test scores and grades at age 16. We show that, on average, the reform had no effect on children's scholastic performance. However, we do find positive effects for children of well-educated mothers, a result that is robust to a number of different specifications. We find no corresponding heterogeneity relative to parental earnings or fathers' education, or relative to other predictors of child performance. We find no effects on intermediate outcomes such as mothers' subsequent earnings, child health, parental fertility, divorce rates, or the mothers' mental health. Overall the results suggest positive causal interaction effects between mothers' education and the amount of time mothers spend with their children. Since the institutional context is one in which the alternative is subsidized day care, the results imply that subsidizing longer parental leave spells rather than day care reinforce the relationship between maternal education and school outcomes.
Using Norwegian registry data we investigate how paternity leave affects fathers’ long-term earnings. In 1993 Norway introduced a paternity quota of the paid parental leave. We estimate a difference-in-differences model which exploits differences in fathers' exposure to the paternity quota. Our analysis suggests that four weeks paternity leave during the child’s first year decreases fathers’ future earnings by 2.1 percent. Importantly, this effect persists up until our last point of observation when the child is five years old. The earnings effect is consistent with increased long-term father involvement, as fathers shift time and effort from market to home production. In an investigation of Norwegian time use data we find additional evidence for this hypothesis.
This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection as well as empirical evidence on the effects of patent rights. Then, the second part considers the international aspects of IPR protection. In summary, this paper draws the following conclusions from the literature. Firstly, different patent policy instruments have different effects on R&D and growth. Secondly, there is empirical evidence supporting a positive relationship between IPR protection and innovation, but the evidence is stronger for developed countries than for developing countries. Thirdly, the optimal level of IPR protection should tradeoff the social benefits of enhanced innovation against the social costs of multiple distortions and income inequality. Finally, in an open economy, achieving the globally optimal level of protection requires an international coordination (rather than the harmonization) of IPR protection.
his paper presents formal models of child development that capture the essence of recent findings from the empirical literature on child development. The goal is to provide theoretical frameworks for interpreting the evidence from a vast empirical literature, for guiding the next generation of empirical studies and for formulating policy. We start from the premise that skill formation is a life-cycle process. It starts in the womb and goes on throughout most of the adult life. Families and firms have a role in this process that is at least as important as the role of schools. There are multiple skills and multiple abilities that are important for adult success. Abilities are both inherited and created, and the traditional debate of nature versus nurture is outdated and scientifically obsolete. The technology of skill formation has two additional important characteristics. The first one is that IQ and behavior are more plastic at early ages than at later ages. Furthermore, behavior is much more malleable than IQ as individuals age. The second is that human capital investments are complementary over time. Early investments increase the productivity of later investments. Early investments are not productive if they are not followed up by later investments. The returns to investing early in the life cycle are high. Remediation of inadequate early investments is difficult and very costly
The problem of determining cause and effect is one of the oldest in the social sciences, where laboratory experimentation is generally not possible. This article provides a perspective on the analysis of causal relationships in population research that draws upon recent discussions of this issue in the field of economics. Within economics, thinking about causal estimation has shifted dramatically in the past decade toward a more pessimistic reading of what is possible and a retreat in the ambitiousness of claims of causal determination. In this article, the framework that underlies this conclusion is presented, the central identification problem is discussed in detail, and examples from the field of population research are given. Some of the more important aspects of this framework are related to the problem of the variability of causal effects for different individuals; the relationships among structural forms, reduced forms, and knowledge of mechanisms; the problem of internal versus external validity and the related issue of extrapolation; and the importance of theory and outside evidence.
It has been argued that a society's gender system may influence parents' sex preferences for children. If this is true, one should expect to find no evidence of such preferences in countries with a high level of gender equality. In this article, we exploit data from population registers from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden to examine continuities and changes in parental sex preferences in the Nordic countries during the past three to four decades. First, we do not observe an effect of the sex of the first born child on second-birth risks. Second, we detect a distinct preference for at least one child of each sex among parents of two children. For third births, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish parents seem to develop a preference for having a daughter, while Finns exhibit a significant preference for having a son. These findings show that modernization and more equal opportunities for women and men do not necessarily lead to parental gender indifference. On the contrary, they may even result in new sex preferences.
We investigate conditions sufficient for identification of average treatment effects using instrumental variables. First we show that the existence of valid instruments is not sufficient to identify any meaningful average treatment effect. We then establish that the combination of an instrument and a condition on the relation between the instrument and the participation status is sufficient for identification of a local average treatment effect for those who can be induced to change their participation status by changing the value of the instrument. Finally we derive the probability limit of the standard IV estimator under these conditions. It is seen to be a weighted average of local average treatment effects.
It is well understood that government policies can distort behaviour. But what is less often recognized is the anticipated introduction of a policy can introduce its own distortions. We study one such “introduction effect”, using evidence from a unique policy change in Australia. In 2004, the Australian government announced that children born on or after July 1, 2004 would receive a $3000 “Baby Bonus.” Although the policy was only announced a few months before its introduction, parents appear to have behaved strategically in order to receive this benefit, with the number of births dipping sharply in the days before the policy commenced. On July 1, 2004, more Australian children were born than on any other single date in the past thirty years. We estimate that over 1000 births were “moved” so as to ensure that their parents were eligible for the Baby Bonus, with about one quarter being moved by more than two weeks. Most of the effect was due to changes in the timing of inducement and caesarean section procedures. This birth-timing event represents a considerable opportunity for health researchers to study the impact of planned birthdays and hospital management issues.
The paper explores the strict school enrolment rules to estimate the effect of age at school entry on school achievement for 15-16 year old students in Norway using achievement tests in reading from OECD-PISA. Since enrolment date is common and compulsory for all students born in a particular calendar year, it is possible to identify the pure effect of enrolment age holding the length of schooling constant. The results indicate that the youngest children (born in December) face a significant disadvantage in reading compared to their older classmates. These results suggest that more flexible enrolment rules should be considered to equalize the opportunities of the children.
The association between the sex of children and their parents' risk of marital disruption is examined using the June 1980 Current Population Survey. The finding is that sons reduce the risk of marital disruption by 9% more than do daughters. This difference holds across marriage cohorts, racial groups, and categories of mother's education. A compelling explanation for these findings, supported by data from the National Survey of Children, stresses a father's greater role in raising sons than daughters and his consequently greater involvement in the family. Children provide a new basis for marital cohesion, one that rests on attachments and obligations to children. For fathers, the obligations and attachments are greater if they have sons.
We estimate peer effects in paid paternity leave in Norway using a regression discontinuity design. Coworkers and brothers are 11 and 15 percentage points, respectively, more likely to take paternity leave if their peer was exogenously induced to take up leave. The most likely mechanism is information transmission, including increased knowledge of how an employer will react. The estimated peer effect snowballs over time, as the first peer interacts with a second peer, the second peer with a third, and so on. This leads to long-run participation rates which are substantially higher than would otherwise be expected.
Do family policies influence attitudes and behavior or are they merely reflections of pre-existing attitudes? We consider the implementation of the Norwegian daddy quota, 4 weeks of parental leave reserved for the father, as a natural experiment, and examine the long-run causal effects on attitudes toward gender equality, on conflicts and sharing of household labor, and on support for public childcare. We find that respondents who had their last born child just after the reform report an 11% lower level of conflicts over household division of labor and that they are 50% more likely to equally divide the task of washing clothes than respondents who had their last child just before the reform.Highlights► We consider the introduction of paternity leave in Norway as a natural experiment. ► We study the effects on attitudes, on conflicts and sharing of household labor. ► We find substantive effects on conflicts and on the task of washing clothes.
This chapter seeks to set out what Economists have learned about the effects of early childhood influences on later life outcomes, and about ameliorating the effects of negative influences. We begin with a brief overview of the theory which illustrates that evidence of a causal relationship between a shock in early childhood and a future outcome says little about whether the relationship in question biological or immutable. We then survey recent work which shows that events before five years old can have large long term impacts on adult outcomes. Child and family characteristics measured at school entry do as much to explain future outcomes as factors that labor economists have more traditionally focused on, such as years of education. Yet while children can be permanently damaged at this age, an important message is that the damage can often be remediated. We provide a brief overview of evidence regarding the effectiveness of different types of policies to provide remediation. We conclude with a list of some of (the many) outstanding questions for future research. Hard-copy subscribers may access the tables for this paper here.
We study the impact on children of increasing the time that the mother spends with her child in the first year by exploiting a reform that increased paid and unpaid maternity leave in Norway. The reform increased maternal leave on average by 4 months and family income was unaffected. The increased time with the child led to a 2.7 percentage points decline in high school dropout. For mothers with low education we find a 5.2 percentage points decline. The effect is also especially large for children of mothers who, prior to the reform, would take very low levels of unpaid leave.
Many developed countries are currently considering a move toward subsidized, widely accessible child care or preschool. However, studies on how large-scale provision of child care affects child development are scarce, and focused on short-run outcomes. We analyze a large-scale expansion of subsidized child care in Norway, addressing the impact on children's long-run outcomes. Our precise and robust difference-in-differences estimates show that subsidized child care had strong positive effects on children's educational attainment and labor market participation, and also reduced welfare dependency. Subsample analyses indicate that girls and children with low-educated mothers benefit the most from child care. (JEL J13, J16)
Investments in children are generally seen as investments in the future economy. In this study I focus on time investments in children as I investigate the long-term educational effects on children of increasing parents' birth-related leave from 14 to 20 weeks using a natural experiment from 1984 in Denmark. The causal effect of the reform is identified using regression discontinuity design to compare a population sample of children born shortly before and shortly after the reform took effect. Results indicate that increasing parents' access to birth-related leave has no measurable effect on children's long-term educational outcomes. Mothers' incomes and career opportunities are slightly positively affected by the reform.
It is well understood that government policies can distort behavior. But what is less often recognized is that the anticipated introduction of a policy can introduce its own distortions. We study one such “introduction effect,” using evidence from a unique policy change in Australia. In 2004, the Australian government announced that children born on or after July 1, 2004 would receive a $3000 “Baby Bonus.” Although the policy was only announced seven weeks before its introduction, parents appear to have behaved strategically in order to receive the benefit, with the number of births dipping sharply before the policy commenced. On July 1, 2004, more Australian children were born than on any other single date in the past thirty years. We estimate that over 1000 births were “moved” so as to ensure that their parents were eligible for the Baby Bonus, with about one quarter being moved by more than one week. Most of the effect was due to changes in the timing of induction and cesarean section procedures. We find evidence to suggest that babies who were shifted into the eligibility period were more likely to be of high birth weight. Two years later, on July 1, 2006, the Baby Bonus was increased, and we find that this again caused births to be moved from June to July. These birth timing events represent an opportunity for health researchers to study the impact of planned birthdays and hospital management issues.
This paper investigates the effect of parental leave – both own and spousal – on subsequent earnings using different sources of variation. Using fixed-effect models, and in line with previous results, parental leave is found to decrease each parent’s future earnings. Also spousal leave is important, but only for mothers. In fact, each month the father stays on parental leave has a larger positive effect on maternal earnings than a similar reduction in the mother’s own leave. Using two reforms of the parental leave system as exogenous sources of variation yields only imprecisely estimated effects, even though the reforms had a strong effect on parental leave usage. However, the point estimates tentatively suggest effects in the same range or larger than the fixed-effects model found.
To identify relative wage impacts of immigration, we make use of licensing requirements in the Norwegian construction sector that give rise to exogenous variation in immigrant employment shares across trades. Individual panel data reveal substantially lower wage growth for workers in trades with rising immigrant employment than for other workers. Selective attrition from the sector masks the causal wage impact unless accounted for by individual fixed effects. For low and semi-skilled workers, effects of new immigration are comparable for natives and older immigrant cohorts, consistent with perfect substitutability between native and immigrant labor within trade. Finally, we present evidence that immigration reduces price inflation, as price increases over the sample period were significantly lower in activities with growth in the immigrant share than in activities with no or small change in immigrant employment.
In every society for which we have data, people's educational achievement is positively correlated with their parents' education or with other indicators of their parents' socioeconomic status. This topic is central in social science, and there is no doubt that research has intensified during recent decades, not least thanks to better data having become accessible to researchers. The purpose of this chapter is to summarize and evaluate recent empirical research on education and family background. Broadly speaking, we focus on two related but distinct motivations for this topic. The first is equality of opportunity. Here, major the research issues are: How important a determinant of educational attainment is family background, and is family background - in the broad sense that incorporates factors not chosen by the individual - a major, or only a minor, determinant of educational attainment? What are the mechanisms that make family background important? Have specific policy reforms been successful in reducing the impact of family background on educational achievement? The second common starting point for recent research has been the child development perspective. Here, the focus is on how human-capital accumulation is affected by early childhood resources. Studies with this focus address the questions: what types of parental resources or inputs are important for children's development, why are they important and when are they important? In addition, this literature focuses on exploring which types of economic policy, and what timing of the policy in relation to children's social and cognitive development, are conducive to children's performance and adult outcomes. The policy interest in this research is whether policies that change parents' resources and restrictions have causal effects on their children.
Increasing returns from specialized human capital is a powerful force creating a division of labor in the allocation of time and investments in human capital between married men and married women. Moreover, since child care and housework are more effort intensive than leisure and other household activities, married women spend less effort on each hour of market work than married men working the same number of hours. Hence, married women have lower hourly earnings than married men with the same market human capital, and they economize on the effort expended on market work by seeking less demanding jobs. The responsibility of married women for child care and housework has major implications for earnings and occupational differences between men and women.
We examine the effects of moving out of high-poverty neighborhoods on the outcomes of teenage youth, a population often seen as most at risk from the adverse effects of such neighborhoods. The randomized design of the Moving To Opportunity demonstration allows us to compare groups of youth, initially similar and living in high-poverty public housing. An experimental group was offered vouchers valid only in a low-poverty neighborhood; a Section 8 group was offered traditional vouchers without geographic restriction; and a control group was not offered vouchers. We study outcomes in four domains: education, risky behavior, mental health, and physical health. Aggregating effect sizes over all of the outcomes, females in both treatment groups benefited from the moves, while males in both treatment groups experienced worse outcomes. Females in the experimental group experienced improvements in education and mental health and were less likely to engage in risky behaviors. Females in the traditional voucher group experienced improvements in mental health. Males in both treatment groups were more likely than controls to engage in risky behaviors and to experience physical health problems. We adopt a multiple-testing framework to account for the large number of estimates considered. We show that the overall effects on females in the experimental group and the effects on mental health for females in both treatment groups were least likely to be due to sampling variation. Families with female children and families with male children moved to similar neighborhoods, suggesting that their outcomes differ not because of exposure to different types of neighborhoods but because male and female youth respond to their environments in different ways.
The prevalence of son preference and its implications for family behaviour in developing countries have received a great deal of scholarly attention, but child-gender bias is believed to be empirically unimportant in wealthy, non-traditional societies. Studies by sociologists and psychologists during the past 30 years, however, have documented consistent discrepancies between the behaviour of parents of sons and parents of daughters--boys tend to increase marital stability and marital satisfaction relative to girls, and fathers spend more time with, and are more involved with, sons than daughters. In recent years, economists have begun to contribute to the child-gender literature, re-examining the effects of sons and daughters on family structure and parental involvement with larger samples and greater concern for possible sources of selection bias. Other economic outcomes, such as market work and earnings, have also been studied, and some investigators have exploited the randomness of child gender as a source of exogenous variation in parental behaviour. In general, recent results suggest that child gender does affect family stability and the time allocation of parents, but it is not clear whether these responses reflect parental preferences for boys rather than girls or differences in the constraints parents face. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.
This paper evaluates the impact of three major expansions in leave coverage in Germany on the long-run education and labor market outcomes of children. Evaluation of three policy reforms as opposed to a single reform enables us to analyze whether the impact of paid leave differs from that of unpaid leave, and whether an expansion of a relatively short leave period is more beneficial to child development than an expansion of an already long leave period. Our empirical analysis combines two large administrative data sources on wages, unemployment, and school outcomes. We identify the causal impact of the reforms by comparing outcomes of children born shortly before and shortly after a change in maternity leave legislation, and therefore require substantially weaker assumptions for identification than existing studies. We find little support for the hypothesis that an expansion in maternity leave legislation improves children’s outcomes. Given the precision of our estimates, we can statistically rule out the hypothesis that the expansion in paid leave from 2 to 6 (unpaid leave from 18 to 36) months raised wages (attendance at high track schools) by more than 0.3 % (0.1 %).
Despite important policy implications associated with the allocation of education resources, evidence on the effectiveness of school inputs remains inconclusive. In part, this is due to endogenous allocation; families sort themselves non-randomly into school districts and school districts allocate money based in order to compensate (or reinforce) differences in child abilities, which leaves estimates of school input effects likely to be biased. Using variation in education expenditures induced by the location of natural resources in Norway we examine the effect of school resources on pupil outcomes. We find that higher school expenditures, triggered by higher revenues from local taxes on hydropower plants, have a significantly positive effect on pupil performance at age 16. The positive IV estimates contrast with the standard cross-sectional estimates that reveal no effects of extra resources.
This paper develops a model of skill formation that explains a variety of findings established in the child development and child intervention literatures. At its core is a technology that is stage-specific and that features self productivity, dynamic complementarity and skill multipliers. Lessons are drawn for the design of new policies to alleviate the consequences of the accident of birth that is a major source of human inequality.
Many countries are trying to incentivize fathers to increase their share in parental leave and in household work to improve female labor market opportunities. Our unique data set stems from a natural experiment in Sweden. The data comprises all children born before (control group) and after the reform (treatment group) in cohorts of up to 27,000 newborns, mothers and fathers. We find strong short term effects of incentives on male parental leave. However, we find no learning-by doing, or specialization, effects: fathers in the treatment group do not have larger shares in the leave taken for care of sick children, which is our measure for household work.
Families, primarily female-headed minority households with children, living in high-poverty public housing projects in five U.S. cities were offered housing vouchers by lottery in the Moving to Opportunity program. Four to seven years after random assignment, families offered vouchers lived in safer neighborhoods that had lower poverty rates than those of the control group not offered vouchers. We find no significant overall effects of this intervention on adult economic self-sufficiency or physical health. Mental health benefits of the voucher offers for adults and for female youth were substantial. Beneficial effects for female youth on education, risky behavior, and physical health were offset by adverse effects for male youth. For outcomes that exhibit significant treatment effects, we find, using variation in treatment intensity across voucher types and cities, that the relationship between neighborhood poverty rate and outcomes is approximately linear. Copyright The Econometric Society 2007.
Handbook of Labor Economics
- D. Almond
- J. Currie
Handbook of the Economics of Education
- A. Björklund
- K. G. Salvanes
Daglige Fødselstall for Norge 1989-93
- Brenn
Omsorgspermisjon med “kjærlig tvang”: en kartlegging av fedrekvoten
- B. Brandth
- B. Øverli
Pre-reform Post-reform Difference Mean SD Mean SD Estimate SE Fathers -% take leave 2
Table 16: Descriptive statistics for cohorts born before and after April 1, 1992
(1)
(2)
(3)
Pre-reform
Post-reform
Difference
Mean SD
Mean SD
Estimate SE
Fathers
-% take leave
2.84
(16.6) 3.47
(18.3) 0.63**
(0.28)
-no. leave days
1.42
(9.99) 2.08
(13.5) 0.65***
(0.19)
Student achievement and birthday effects. Memo Norwegian University of Science and Technology
- B Strøm
Strøm, B. (2004). Student achievement and birthday effects. Memo Norwegian University
of Science and Technology.
35