Do Generous Parental Leave Policies Help Top Female Earners?

Gozde Corekcioglu, Marco Francesconi and Astrid Kunze

No 13275, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: women; parental leave; top earners; regression discontinuity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J18 J21 J22 J24 M14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-eur and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published - published in: Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2020, 36(4), 882-902

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Related works:
Working Paper: Do Generous Parental Leave Policies Help Top Female Earners? (2020)
Working Paper: Do Generous Parental Leave Policies Help Top Female Earners? (2020)
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