Competition and Career Advancement: The Hidden Costs of Paid Leave

Julian Johnsen (), Hyejin Ku and Kjell G Salvanes
Additional contact information
Julian Johnsen: Norwegian School of Economics

No 2020-059, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: Does leave-taking matter for young workers' careers? If so, why? We propose the competition effect—relative leave status of workers affecting their relative standing inside the firm—as a new explanation. Exploiting a policy reform that exogenously assigned four-week paid paternity leave to some new fathers, we find evidence consistent with the competition effect: A worker enjoys a better post-child earnings trajectory when a larger share of his colleagues take leave because of the policy. In contrast, we find no direct earnings effect resulting from the worker's own leave when controlling for their relative leave eligibility status within the firm.

Keywords: leave of absence; career interruptions; ranking; tournament; promotion; gender gap (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J22 J24 J31 M51 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen and nep-lma
Note: MIP
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Johnso ... ement-paid-leave.pdf First version, July 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Competition and Career Advancement: The Hidden Costs of Paid Leave (2020)
Working Paper: Competition and Career Advancement:The Hidden Costs of Paid Leave (2020)
Working Paper: Competition and Career Advancement: The Hidden Costs of Paid Leave (2020)
Working Paper: Competition and Career Advancement: The Hidden Costs of Paid Leave (2020)
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:hka:wpaper:2020-059

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jennifer Pachon ().