Does Paid Parental Leave Affect Children's Schooling Outcomes? Replicating Danzer and Lavy (2018)

Danzer and Lavy (2018) study how the duration of paid parental leave affects children's educational performance using data from PISA. An extension of the maximum duration from 12 to 24 months in Austria had no statistically significant effect on average, but the authors highlight the existence of large and statistically significant heterogenous effects that vary in sign depending on the education of mothers and children's gender. The policy increased the scores obtained by sons of highly educated mothers by 33% of a standard deviation (SD) in Reading and 40% SD in Science. On the contrary, sons of low educated mothers experienced a decrease of 27% SD in Reading and 23% SD in Science. In this article, I replicate their study following the recommended estimation procedure taking into account both the survey's stratified two-stage sample design and the fact that PISA relies on imputation to derive student scores. I show that the estimates of the effects of the parental leave extension become substantially smaller in absolute magnitude and non-significant.