Do Family Policies Reduce Gender Inequality? Evidence from 60 Years of Policy Experimentation

By H. Kleven, Camille Landais, J. Posch, Andreas Steinhauer, Josef Zweimüller. Social Science Research Network, 2020

156 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 D63, J13, J16, J31, J32)

Subfields: Gender Studies, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2d3df6508eebe3e6edaa05516eae730991d7a1e4