Parental Leave – A Policy Evaluation of the Swedish "Daddy-Month" Reform
نویسندگان
چکیده
Parental Leave – A Policy Evaluation of the Swedish “Daddy-Month” Reform Many countries are trying to incentivize fathers to increase their share in parental leave and in household work to improve female labor market opportunities. Our unique data set stems from a natural experiment in Sweden. The data comprises all children born before (control group) and after the reform (treatment group) in cohorts of up to 27,000 newborns, mothers and fathers. We find strong short term effects of incentives on male parental leave. However, we find no learning-by doing, or specialization, effects: fathers in the treatment group do not have larger shares in the leave taken for care of sick children, which is our measure for household work. JEL Classification: J48, J13, J16, J22
منابع مشابه
Sharing Responsibility? Short- and Long-term E ects of Sweden’s “Daddy-Month” Reform
In 1995, the Swedish government reformed the parental leave system with the view to increase the share of fathers in child care, change gender roles in society, and improve the chances of mothers in the labor market. We investigate a unique data set comprising the entire population of Swedish children born in a span of two weeks before and two weeks after the reform. The reform constitutes a na...
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