Efficient Intra-Household Allocation of Parental Leave

Juliane Parys () and Gregor Schwerhoff ()
Additional contact information
Juliane Parys: University of Bonn

No 5113, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)

Abstract: We propose a model of how parents resolve conflicts about sharing the negative short and long-term consequences from parenthood-related career interruptions on earnings. We introduce childcare sharing in a collective model of household behavior with public consumption as in Blundell, Chiappori, and Meghier (2005). Conceptually, the solution to the household problem can be thought of as a two-stage process: Parents first agree on public expenditures on professional childcare; then, conditional on the level of public consumption and the budget constraint stemming from stage one, parents determine their individual job absence durations and private consumption shares. Using relative income measures from German parental benefit data as distribution factors, we find evidence for Pareto efficiency in childcare sharing. More precisely, households with higher total incomes purchase more professional childcare, and changes in distribution factors shift the conditional parental leave allocation in favor of the partner whose relative income increased.

Keywords: childcare; collective model; conditional sharing rule; intra-household allocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 J12 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
Date: 2010-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://ftp.iza.org/dp5113.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp5113

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 for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Address: IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Fallak ().