Work Disability after Motherhood and How Paternity Leave Can Help

Sébastien Fontenay () and Ilan Tojerow
Additional contact information
Sébastien Fontenay: Universitat Pompeu Fabra

No 13756, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study how childbirth increases the likelihood of young, working mothers to claim disability insurance and how paternity leave could ease this effect. Our event study analysis uses Belgian data to show that the incidence rate of disability across gender only diverges after first-time childbirth. This "other child penalty" can be reduced with the provision of paternity leave. Our regression discontinuity difference-in-differences design shows that mothers with partners eligible for a two-week-long paternity leave spent on average 21% fewer days on disability over twelve years. Moreover, we show links between this incidence of paternity leave and consequent birth-spacing decisions.

Keywords: disability insurance; gender; child penalty; paternity leave; maternal health; birth spacing; natural experiment; regression discontinuity; event study (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H55 I13 J13 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 65 pages
Date: 2020-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-ias and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13756.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Work Disability after Motherhood and how Paternity Leave can Help (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:iza:izadps:dp13756

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().