Paternity Leave and the Motherhood Penalty: New Causal Evidence

Abstract

Objective:The objective of this study was to test how a father's paternity leave affects the within-household gender wage gap among heterosexual couples. Background: Previous studies focus on the actual number of days of leave the father takes, but if an important driver of the gender wage gap is the effect of parental leave on gender-specific household specialization, absolute variations in the father's leave should not be the key interest. Instead, this article tests the effect of the extent of the father's leave relative to that of the mother's leave because it is this variation that plausibly affects the division of household labor and through this the within-household gender wage gap. Method: Full sample, administrative data are from Statistics Denmark. Causal inference was facilitated by exploiting 5 Danish parental leave reforms on 5 separate samples of all households who become first-time parents within the year before and after each reform (N 1 = 2,304; N 2 = 45,683; N 3 = 16,668; N 4 = 42,328; N 5 = 38,978).

Workplace support and European fathers’ use of state policies promoting shared childcare

“…Most researched is childcare sharing; fathers participate more actively in the care of their young children the longer they have taken parental leave in the past (Almqvist & Duvander, 2014;Arnalds, Eydal, & Gislason, 2013;Bünning, 2015;Evertsson, Boye, & Erman, 2018;Haas & Hwang, 2008;Meil, 2013;Nepomnyaschy & Waldfogel, 2007;Pragg & Knoester, 2017). Fathers' use of parental leave also has positive benefits for children's development (Cools, Fiva, & Kirkeboen, 2015;Huerta et al, 2013;Liu & Skans, 2009), as well as mothers' employment income (Andersen, 2018;Evertsson & Duvander, 2011). Experts argue that until organizations see work-family issues as a man's as well as a woman's issue, the equality gap will widen (Mills & Culbertson, 2017).…”

Integrating Immigrants into the Nordic Labour Markets

“…A few studies have used Nordic paternity leave reforms as quasi-experiments. The results of these studies were mixed: a positive impact of the number of earmarked weeks for fathers on female employment was found in Denmark and in Sweden (Johansson 2010, Duvander and Johansson 2015, Andersen 2016) but not in Norway (Cools et al 2015, Hart et al 2016).…”

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

“…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).…”

“…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. For relative earnings within a couple, Avdic and Karimi (2018) and Dahl et al (2014) examined mothers' income share of total family income, and Andersen (2018) examined the absolute gender wage gap within the household.…”

“…There is a lot of variation in the time frame analyzed for these studies using various outcomes. For example, studies examine logged monthly wages 1 to 12 years after a policy reform (Ekberg et al 2013), average earnings two to five years after a focal birth (Cools et al 2015), total earnings during the first three years after birth (Avdic and Karimi 2018), total earnings during the 12 years after a focal birth (Dahl et al 2014), and earnings differences between one year before and four years after a focal birth (Andersen 2018).…”