Parental Leave - a Policy Evaluation of the Swedish 'Daddy-Month' Reform

By J. Ekberg, R. Eriksson, Guido Friebel. Social Science Research Network, 2005

344 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many governments are making attempts to increase fathers' share of parental leave in order to correct for unequal labor market outcomes. Using Swedish data, we ask whether fathers can be encouraged to take more parental leave in order to mitigate the negative consequences of mothers' career interruptions. The unique data stem from a reform of parental leave, resulting in a clean natural experiment. Data comprise all children born before (control group) and after (treatment group) the date of implementation of the reform, in cohorts of up to 27,000 newborns, mothers and fathers. We find strong short-term effects of the incentives on male parental leave, but no behavioral effects in the household. Fathers in the treatment group do not take larger shares of the leave taken for care of sick children, which is our measure for household work. We also investigate a second data set on fathers' and mothers' long-term wages and employment, without finding evidence for substantial effects of the reform.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ec399d3659ffb00efeaa5708aaf4eed730ee91e8

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Citations in the corpus

Causal Effects of Paternity Leave on Children and Parents (2015, positive): “Using paternal quota reforms in Sweden, Ekberg et al. (2005) find no evidence that paternity leave affects the extent to which fathers care for children when they are sick, whereas Johansson (2010) finds no causal effect on mothers’ and fathers’ earnings.”
Children and the Remaining Gender Gaps in the Labor Market (2020, positive): “An early evaluation of the introduction of daddy quotas in Sweden in 1995, that reserved one month of the total parental leave for fathers, presents little evidence that the reform induced fathers to take on more childcare duties and improved women’s longer-term career outcomes (Ekberg et al., 2013)”
Does paternity leave reduce fertility? (2019, background): “…somewhat mixed, suggests that reserving time of the parental leave to fathers, while substantially increasing their take-up rate, does not significantly affect the employment outcomes of either parent (see Ekberg et al. 2013 for Sweden, Bartel et al. 2018 for the US or Patnaik 2015 for Canada).”
The state intervenes in the battle of the sexes: Causal effects of paternity leave (2011, neutral): “Ekberg et al. (2005) is the only previous study on the effects of parental leave on household division of labor that use a design allowing them to make causal claims.”
Maternity and Family Leave Policy (2017, neutral): “…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) for evidence from Sweden; Dustmann and Schönberg (2012) and Schönberg and Ludsteck (2014) for evidence from Germany; and Dahl et…”
Equal but Inequitable: Who Benefits from Gender-Neutral Tenure Clock Stopping Policies? (2016, neutral): “[9] Ekberg, John, Rickard Eriksson, and Guido Friebel.”
PERSPECTIVE ARTICLE: The impact of Nordic countries’ family friendly policies on employment, wages, and children (2008, background): “Sweden was also the first to introduce parental leave, see Ekberg et al. (2005) .”
The Parental Leave Benefit Reform in Germany: Costs and Labour Market Outcomes of Moving towards the Nordic Model (2008, neutral): “…exist on the direct link between parental leave policies and fertility (e.g., Hoem, Prskawetz, and Neyer 2001 and Büttner and Lutz 1990) and on gender equality and other issues (see, Duvander and Andersson 2006, Ekberg, Eriksson, and Friebel 2005, Oláh 2003 and Brunning and Plantenga 1999)6.”
Reserving Time for Daddy: The Consequences of Fathers’ Quotas (2019, neutral): “(10)Research on how paternity leave affects women’s long-term employment and wages is limited and inconsistent in findings (Johansson, 2010; Kotsadam et al., 2010; Karimi et al., 2012; Ekberg et al., 2013).”
Parental leave regulations, mothers’ labor force attachment and fathers’ childcare involvement: evidence from a natural experiment (2013, positive): “Similar identification strategies comparing those giving birth shortly before a reform with those giving birth shortly after have been used for example by Schönberg and Ludsteck (2008), Lalive and Zweimüller (2009) and Ekberg et al. (2005).”