The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of the extended parental leave in the return to work for mothers of newborn children. Parental leaves have been introduced in the last 30 years in all European countries in order to extend the period of job-protection, allowing both parents to...

Over the past 15 years, Russia experienced an increase in childcare enrolment from 55% to 66.2%, reflecting an increase in childcare availability that was rolled out unequally across the Russian regions - the enrolment rate has increased from less than 1% in some regions to almost 35% in other...

This paper examines the effect of postpartum depression (PPD) on maternal employment in the UK and assesses the extent of the direct and indirect link between PPD and maternal employment up to eleven years after the birth of the child. The study tests a range of factors (marital status, physical...

The labor supply effects of becoming a grandmother are not well established in the empirical literature. We estimate the effect of becoming a grandmother on the labor supply decision of older workers. Under the assumption that grandmothers cannot predict the exact date of conception of their...

The negative association between fertility and female labour supply is complicated by the endogeneity of fertility. We address this problem by using an exogenous variation in family size caused by infertility shocks, related to the fact that nature prevents some women from achieving their...

Twin births are often construed as a natural experiment in the social and natural sciences on the premise that their occurrence is quasi-random. We present new population-level evidence challenging this premise. Using data on about 18 million births in 72 countries, we find that maternal...

This paper estimates the causal effects of breastfeeding on early child development using exogenous variation in breastfeeding support policies across UK maternity hospitals. Based on data from the Millennium Cohort Study, we find that mothers giving birth in hospitals where such policies are...

This paper asks whether the availability of breastfeeding facilities at the workplace helps to reconcile breastfeeding and work commitments. Using data from the 2005 UK Infant Feeding Survey, we model the joint probability to return to work and breastfeeding and analyse its association with the...

We investigate restructuring of the health system in Brazil motivated to operationalize universal health coverage. Using administrative data from multiple sources and an event study approach that exploits the staggered rollout of programmatic changes across municipalities, we find large...

We investigate women's fertility, labor, and marriage market responses to large declines in child mortality in the U.S. Fertility declined on the intensive margin as expected. However, despite the increasing value of having at least one child, a larger share of women remained childless. We...