The Duration of Paid Parental Leave and Children's Scholastic Performance

By Qian Liu, O. N. Skans. Social Science Research Network, 2010

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We study how the duration of paid parental leave affects the accumulation of cognitive skills among children. Using a reform which extended parental leave benefits from 12 to 15 months for Swedish children born after August 1988 we evaluate the effects of prolonged parental leave on children's test scores and grades at age 16. We show that, on average, the reform had no effect on children's scholastic performance. However, we do find positive effects for children of well-educated mothers, a result that is robust to a number of different specifications. We find no corresponding heterogeneity relative to parental earnings or fathers' education, or relative to other predictors of child performance. We find no effects on intermediate outcomes such as mothers' subsequent earnings, child health, parental fertility, divorce rates, or the mothers' mental health. Overall the results suggest positive causal interaction effects between mothers' education and the amount of time mothers spend with their children. Since the institutional context is one in which the alternative is subsidized day care, the results imply that subsidizing longer parental leave spells rather than day care reinforce the relationship between maternal education and school outcomes.

Subfields: Education, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3dc42e5d5d037e2a3470c488c7ccd20b799f3778

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Citations in the corpus

Can’t buy mommy’s love? Universal childcare and children’s long-term cognitive development (2014, background): “Exploiting parental leave expansions, most studies do not find any significant effect on children’s long-run development (Baker and Milligan 2011; Dustmann and Schöenberg 2012; Liu and Oskar 2010; Rasmussen 2010).”
Reserving Time for Daddy: The Consequences of Fathers’ Quotas (2019, unknown): “Expansions in maternity leave were found to delay mother’s return to work and increase job continuity but have little effect on employment in the long run, both in Canada (Baker and Milligan, 2008a,b; Hanratty and Trzcinski, 2009; Baker and Milligan, 2010, 2015) and in Europe (Liu and Skans, 2010; D”
Causal Effects of Paternity Leave on Children and Parents (2015, unknown): “Relative importance of parents Using Swedish data, Liu and Skans (2010) find that the duration of general parental leave (typically taken by mothers) has no effect on average on children’s school performance.”
Maternity leave and children’s cognitive and behavioral development (2014, unknown): “…countries, indicates that reforms that increased mother’s time at home at child ages ranging from 2 months through 15 months had little average impact on measures of later school performance or wages (i.e., Dustmann and Schonberg 2012; Rasmussen 2010; Liu and Skans 2010; and Danzer and Lavy 2013).”
Early Maternal Time Investment and Early Child Outcomes (2016, background): “…(Haveman and Wolfe, 1995; Ermisch and Francesconi, 2001, 2013; Brooks-Gunn et al., 2002; Ruhm, 2004; Berger et al., 2005; Baker and Milligan, 2010; Liu and Skans, 2010; Almond and Currie, 2011a,b; Bj€orklund and Salvanes, 2011; Havnes and Mogstad, 2011; Dustmann and Sch€onberg, 2012; Ermisch et…”
Maternity and Family Leave Policy (2017, unknown): “For women in the second group, the leave policy may increase short-run employment, as some of them may choose to stay employed and take 12See, also: Ruhm (1998) for evidence from 16 European countries; Patnaik (2016) for evidence on fathers in Canada; Liu and Skans (2010) and Ekberg et al. (2013) fo”
Does early child care affect children's development? (2018, unknown): “WuertzRasmussen (2010), Liu and Skans (2010), Baker and Milligan (2012), and Dustmann and Schoenberg (2012) find no effects, whereas Carneiro et al. (2014) and Danzer and Lavy (forthcoming) detect some positive long-term effects on education and labor market outcomes.”