A child's family structure is a fundamental determinant of future well-being, making it essential to understand how public policies affect the involvement of fathers. In this paper, we exploit a reform of the German parental leave system which increased mother's income and reduced legal father's...

We study how fathers' time impacts children's human capital using the introduction of earmarked paternity leave in Sweden. We use administrative data on parents' leave uptake and children's educational outcomes in a difference-in-discontinuities design, exploiting the plausibly random timing of...

We examine the effect of joint custody on marriage, divorce, fertility and female employment in Austria using individual-level administrative data, covering the entire population. We also use unique data obtained from court records to analyze the effect on post-divorce outcomes. Our estimates...

We study the effect of the size of the welfare state on family outcomes in OECD member countries. Exploiting exogenous variation in public social spending, due to varying degrees of political fractionalization (i.e. the number of relevant parties involved in the legislative process), we show...

Since the 1970s almost all states have introduced a form of joint custody after divorce. We analyze the causal effect of these custody law reforms on the incidence of marriage and divorce. Our identification strategy exploits the different timing of reforms across states and the control group of...

We estimate the returns to more targeted disability insurance (DI) programs in terms of labor force participation, program spillovers, and worker health. To do so, we analyze workers after an acute workplace injury that experience differential levels of application screening. We find that when...

We draw lessons from existing work and our own analysis on the effects of parental leave and other interventions aimed at aiding families. The outcomes of interest are female employment, gender gaps in earnings and fertility. We begin with a discussion of the historical introduction of family...

This paper discusses social protection initiatives in the context of developing countries and explores the opportunities they present for promoting a gender-equality agenda and women's empowerment. The paper begins with a brief introduction on the emergence of social protection (SP) and how it...

In this paper, I assess whether earnings-dependent maternity leave positively impacts fertility and narrows the baby gap between highly educated (high-earning) and less-educated (low-earning) women. I exploit a major maternity leave benefit reform in Germany that considerably increased the...

We provide a novel interpretation of the estimated treatment effects from evaluations of parental leave reforms. Accounting for the counterfactual mode of care is crucial in the analysis of child outcomes and potential mediators. We evaluate a large and generous parental leave extension in...