Paid parental leave and maternal reemployment: Do part-time subsidies help or harm?

Franziska Zimmert () and Michael Zimmert ()

No 2002, Economics Working Paper Series from University of St. Gallen, School of Economics and Political Science

Abstract: Employment subsidies can incentivize mothers to shorten employment interruptions after childbirth. We examine a German parental leave reform promoting an early return to work in part-time. Exploiting the exogenous variation in the benefit entitlement length defined by the child’s birthday, we apply machine-learning augmented semi-parametric difference-indifference estimation using administrative data. The reform yields positive average employment effects mainly driven by part-time employment as our dynamic optimization model for mothers on parental leave suggests. Conditional effects show that the policy creates heterogenous incentives depending on the opportunity costs of working part-time.

Keywords: Causal machine learning; effect heterogeneity; maternal labor supply; parental leave; Germany (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 J21 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 59 pages
Date: 2020-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-dem, nep-eur and nep-lma
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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