Does Parental Leave Affect Fertility and Return-to-Work? Evidence from a “True Natural Experiment” We study the causal effects of changes in parental leave provisions on fertility and return-towork behavior. We exploit a policy change that took place in 1990 in Austria which extended the maximum duration of parental leave from the child’s first to the child’s second birthday. As parental leave ...

This paper investigates the effects of a large-scale paid maternity leave program on birth outcomes in the United States. In 1978, states with Temporary Disability Insurance (TDI) programs were required to start providing wage replacement benefits to pregnant women, substantially increasing access to antenatal and postnatal paid leave for working mothers. Using natality data, I find that TDI pa...

We consider the role that firm attributes play in accounting for the divergence in the careers of women and men, in terms of the wage and non-wage attributes of jobs, with the onset of parenthood. We exploit a matched employer-employee data set from Sweden that provides a rich set of firm and worker attributes. We index firms by their “family friendliness” and analyze the effect of firm family ...

This paper addresses the problem of semi-supervised classification on document collections using retraining (also called self-training). A possible application is focused Web crawling which may start with very few, manually selected, training documents but can be enhanced by automatically adding initially unlabeled, positively classifiedWeb pages for retraining. Such an approach is by itself no...

Despite mandatory parental-leave policies being a prevalent feature of labor markets in developed countries, the aggregate effects of leave policies are not well understood. In order to assess the quantitative impact of mandated leave policies in the economy, we develop a general-equilibrium model of fertility and labor-market decisions that builds on the labor market framework of Mortensen and...

This paper provides exact analytical expressions for the bias, variance, and RMS for the resubstitution and leave-one-out error estimators in the case of linear discriminant analysis (LDA) in the univariate heteroskedastic Gaussian model. Neither the variances nor the sample sizes for the two classes need be the same. The generality of heteroskedasticity (unequal variances) is a fundamental fea...