Parental Leave - A Policy Evaluation of the Swedish "Daddy-Month" Reform

John Ekberg, Rickard Eriksson and Guido Friebel ()
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John Ekberg: SOFI, Stockholm University
Guido Friebel: University of Toulouse (EHESS and IDEI), CEPR and IZA Bonn

No 1617, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: Many countries are trying to incentivize fathers to increase their share in parental leave and in household work to improve female labor market opportunities. Our unique data set stems from a natural experiment in Sweden. The data comprises all children born before (control group) and after the reform (treatment group) in cohorts of up to 27,000 newborns, mothers and fathers. We find strong short term effects of incentives on male parental leave. However, we find no learning-by doing, or specialization, effects: fathers in the treatment group do not have larger shares in the leave taken for care of sick children, which is our measure for household work.

Keywords: natural experiment; family benefits; gender and labor; incentives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J48 J13 J16 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-eec and nep-lab
Date: 2005-05
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