Do Family Policies Reduce Gender Inequality? Evidence from 60 Years of Policy Experimentation

Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, Johanna Posch, Andreas Steinhauer and Josef Zweimüller

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2024, vol. 16, issue 2, 110-49

Abstract: Do family policies reduce gender inequality in the labor market? We contribute to this debate by investigating the joint impact of parental leave and childcare, using administrative data covering Austrian workers over more than half a century. We start by quasi-experimentally identifying the causal effects of all family policy reforms since the 1950s on the full dynamics of male and female earnings. We then map these causal estimates into a decomposition framework to compute counterfactual gender inequality series. Our results show that the enormous expansions of parental leave and childcare have had virtually no impact on gender convergence.

JEL-codes: D63 J13 J16 J31 J32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Do family policies reduce gender inequality? Evidence from 60 years of policy experimentation (2024)
Working Paper: Do Family Policies Reduce Gender Inequality? Evidence from 60 Years of Policy Experimentation (2021)
Working Paper: Do Family Policies Reduce Gender Inequality? Evidence from 60 Years of Policy Experimentation (2020)
Working Paper: Do Family Policies Reduce Gender Inequality? Evidence from 60 Years of Policy Experimentation (2020)
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DOI: 10.1257/pol.20210346

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