Child-Care in Norway: Use of Parental Leave by Fathers

Ghazala Naz ()
Additional contact information
Ghazala Naz: INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION, Postal: Breiviksveien 40, N-5045 Bergen, Norway

No 12/07, Working Papers in Economics from University of Bergen, Department of Economics

Abstract: An important feature of parental leave in Norway is that it allows significant sharing of leave between parents. Parents may take 54 weeks of leave and receive 80 per cent of previous earnings or 44 weeks of leave with 100 per cent of earnings, up to a ceiling amount. Nine weeks of total leave are, however, reserved for the mother and six weeks for the father and, as a general rule, these weeks cannot be transferred to the other parent. The remaining parental leave can be shared between parents. A reserved period of leave for fathers, known as the paternity quota, was introduced in 1993. Initially, this quota was four weeks. The paternity quota has been a great success and is utilized by 80–85 per cent of eligible fathers; however, very few fathers share gender-neutral parental leave. In this paper, we use register data to investigate factors that may influence fathers’ share of parental leave for children born in 2001. We find that married fathers use more leave than cohabitants. In addition, fathers’ education, mothers’ income and number of preschool children positively affect fathers’ use of the paternity quota and gender-neutral leave. Fathers’ workplace does not affect the use of the paternity quota but has a significant effect on the use of gender-neutral leave.

Keywords: Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination; Public Policy. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2011-03-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hme and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://ekstern.filer.uib.no/svf/2007/No.%2012-07.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:bergec:2007_012

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Bergen, Department of Economics Institutt for økonomi, Universitetet i Bergen, Postboks 7802, 5020 Bergen, Norway. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kjell Erik Lommerud ().