Becoming a mompreneur: Parental leave policies and mothers' propensity for self-employment

Ruud Gerards and Pomme Theunissen ()

No 25, Research Memorandum from Maastricht University, Graduate School of Business and Economics (GSBE)

Abstract: Contractionary parental leave policy reforms decrease the time mothers can stay at home after giving birth. This might discourage them to become an entrepreneur. Exploiting a German parental leave policy reform, we apply a regression discontinuity approach to establish a causal relationship between parental leave policies and the probability for mothers to become entrepreneurs (i.e., “mompreneurs”). We find that a decrease in the generosity of parental leave lowers the odds of mothers to become self-employed by 17%. We show additional evidence that suggests that this is particularly due to the reduced period of paid parental leave.

JEL-codes: H31 J10 J20 L26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-12-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:unm:umagsb:2018025

DOI: 10.26481/umagsb.2018025

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