Do family policies reduce gender inequality? Evidence from 60 years of policy experimentation

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

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

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)
Pages: 40 pages
Date: 2024-05-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Published in American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 1, May, 2024, 16(2), pp. 110 - 149. ISSN: 1945-7731

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/117492/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: 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)
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:ehl:lserod:117492

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().