Parental leave — A policy evaluation of the Swedish “Daddy-Month” reform

John Ekberg, Rickard Eriksson () and Guido Friebel ()

Journal of Public Economics, 2013, vol. 97, issue C, 131-143

Abstract: Many governments are making attempts to increase fathers' share of parental leave in order to correct for unequal labor market outcomes. Using Swedish data, we ask whether fathers can be encouraged to take more parental leave in order to mitigate the negative consequences of mothers' career interruptions. The unique data stem from a reform of parental leave, resulting in a clean natural experiment. Data comprise all children born before (control group) and after (treatment group) the date of implementation of the reform, in cohorts of up to 27,000 newborns, mothers and fathers. We find strong short-term effects of the incentives on male parental leave, but no behavioral effects in the household. Fathers in the treatment group do not take larger shares of the leave taken for care of sick children, which is our measure for household work. We also investigate a second data set on fathers' and mothers' long-term wages and employment, without finding evidence for substantial effects of the reform.

Keywords: Natural experiment; Family benefits; Gender and labor markets; Incentives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J16 J22 J48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (115)

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Working Paper: Parental Leave – A Policy Evaluation of the Swedish "Daddy-Month" Reform (2005)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:97:y:2013:i:c:p:131-143

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2012.09.001

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