Many countries offer new parents long periods of paid leave. Proponents argue that parental leave programs can reduce gender gaps in the labor market, support marital stability and promote children's well-being. In this paper, I show that lengthy leaves can instead work against several of these...

We examine how a paid parental leave reform causally affected families' living arrangements. The German reform we examine replaced a means-tested benefit with a universal transfer paid out for a shorter period. Combining a regression discontinuity with a difference-in-differences design, we find...

In a model with endogenous fertility and labor supply three instruments of family policies are analyzed: child benefits, subsidies for external child care, and parental leave payments. We compare the impact on the quantity and quality of children, the secondary earner's labor supply and welfare....

This paper examines the effect of the introduction of a 1982 maternity benefit program on childbearing, employment and marital stability in the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The program included one year of partially paid leave and a small cash payment at birth. We...

This paper examines the causal effects of television exposure on individual decisions regarding marriage, divorce, and family planning by utilizing a natural experiment in the German Democratic Republic during the period of German division. I exploit the fact that individuals in some East German...

Many OECD countries have implemented policies to induce couples to share parental leave. This paper investigates how responsive intra-household leave-sharing is to changes in economic incentives. To investigate this fundamental question, we are forced to look at one of the Nordic countries which...

We propose a model of how parents resolve conflicts about sharing the negative short and long-term consequences from parenthood-related career interruptions on earnings. We introduce childcare sharing in a collective model of household behavior with public consumption as in Blundell, Chiappori,...

Many OECD countries have implemented policies to induce couples to share parental leave. This paper investigates how responsive intra-household leave-sharing is to changes in economic incentives. To investigate this fundamental question, we are forced to look at one of the Nordic countries which...

We consider a non-cooperative model of the household, in which the husband and wife decide on parental leave and the allocation of time between child rearing and the labor market. They can choose the non-cooperative outside option or cooperate by reaching an agreement of specialization in which...

Many OECD countries have implemented policies to induce couples to share parental leave. This paper investigates how responsive intra-household leave-sharing is to changes in economic incentives. To investigate this fundamental question, we are forced to look at one of the Nordic countries which...