Economic consequences of family policies

Claudia Olivetti and Barbara Petrongolo

CentrePiece - The magazine for economic performance from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: There is no compelling evidence that extended parental leave rights have a positive impact on female employment, according to research by Claudia Olivetti and Barbara Petrongolo, which analyses the labour market effects of family-oriented policies - such as parental leave, childcare support and flexible work arrangements - in 30 OECD countries over 45 years. Their study finds that job-protected parental leave entitlements up to 18 months are associated with better female employment and wage outcomes. But longer and more generously paid parental leave entitlements may be detrimental to female employment, especially for the less skilled. Making it easier to be a working mother, via subsidised childcare, leads to better labour market outcomes than extending parental leave.

Keywords: parental leave; childcare; family policies; gender gaps (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J16 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cp533.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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepcnp:533

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CentrePiece - The magazine for economic performance from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().