Does paternity leave reduce fertility?

Abstract

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The Effects of Paternity Leave on Parents’ Earnings Trajectories and Earnings Inequality

“…The results for Dahl et al (2014) may not be generalizable due to their more limited analytic sample constructed because of their specific focus on peer effects. Outside the Nordic countries, Farré and González (2019) find that the introduction of two-week paternity leave in Spain had no impact on fathers' earnings 6 to 24 months after birth. To our knowledge, there are no studies that show how the impact of paternity leave on earnings evolved over time.…”

“…A number of recent studies have empirically examined how paternity leave policies affect parental earnings. Most of the papers examine the Nordic countries, such as Norway (Kotsadam et al 2011;Rege and Solli 2013;Dahl et al 2014;Cools et al 2015), Sweden (Johansson 2010;Ekberg et al 2013;Avdic and Karimi 2018) and Demark (Andersen 2018), with one paper from Spain (Farré and González 2019). Some of them focus on earnings as the main outcomes (Johansson 2010;Kotsadam et al 2011;Rege and Solli 2013;Ekberg et al 2013;Cools et al 2015;Andersen 2018), but others analyze earnings as supplementary to their main interest which is peer effects in use of leave (Dahl et al 2014), marital dissolution (Avdic and Karimi 2018), and subsequent fertility (Farré and González 2019).…”

“…Existing research examine the effects of paternity leave on several different outcomes and various time frames. For example, Rege and Solli (2013) examined only fathers' earnings as an outcome, but other papers have examined both fathers' earnings and their spouse's earnings (Johansson 2010;Kotsadam et al 2011;Ekberg et al 2013;Dahl et al 2014;Cools et al 2015;Avdic and Karimi 2018;Andersen 2018;Farré and González 2019). Of these, the only one that explicitly examines total family income as an outcome is Avdic and Karimi (2018), although others (Dahl et al 2014;Cools et al 2015;Andersen 2018) have presented the impact on father's and mother's earnings levels as parallel outcomes but not shown statistical tests for earnings at the family level.…”

“…Johansson (2010) finds a positive impact four years after a birth using a fixed effect model, but no impact with a differences-in-differences model. Andersen 2018finds that father's use of a higher share of total leave positively impacted mother's earnings two to four years after a birth, and Farré and González (2019) find that the introduction of a two-week paternity leave in Spain increased maternal earnings 24 months after a birth.…”

“…All of the studies we discussed have examined a policy reform as exogenous variation to identify causal effects of paternity leave on earnings. The most commonly used empirical strategies in this literature are Differences-in-Differences (DD) (Rege and Solli 2013;Cools et al 2015; Avdic and Karimi 2018) and Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) (Kotsadam et al 2011;Dahl et al 2014;Ekberg et al 2013;Farré and González 2019). Taking a different approach, Johansson (2010), estimated fixed effect models and compared these results to DD models.…”