Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP13780
Authors: Petra Persson; Maya Rossin-Slater
Abstract: While workplace flexibility is perceived to be a key determinant of maternal labor supply, less is known about fathers’ demand for flexibility or about intra-household spillover effects of flexibility initiatives. This paper examines these issues in the context of a critical period in family life—the months immediately following childbirth—and identifies the impacts of paternal access to workplace flexibility on maternal postpartum health. We model household demand for paternal presence at home as a function of domestic stochastic shocks, and use variation from a Swedish reform that granted new fathers more flexibility to take intermittent parental leave during the postpartum period in a regression discontinuity difference-in-differences (RD-DD) design. We find that increasing the father’s temporal flexibility reduces the risk of the mother experiencing physical postpartum health complications and improves her mental health. Our results suggest that mothers bear the burden from a lack of workplace flexibility—not only directly through greater career costs of family formation, as previously documented—but also indirectly, as fathers’ inability to respond to domestic shocks exacerbates the maternal health costs of childbearing.
Keywords: workplace flexibility; intrahousehold spillovers; maternal postpartum health; paternity leave
JEL Codes: I12; I18; I31; J12; J13; J38
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Increasing fathers' temporal flexibility (J22) | Reduces the likelihood of mothers experiencing physical postpartum health complications (I14) |
| Increasing fathers' temporal flexibility (J22) | Reduces the likelihood of mothers having an inpatient or specialist outpatient visit for childbirth-related complications (J13) |
| Increasing fathers' temporal flexibility (J22) | Reduces the likelihood of mothers receiving an antibiotic prescription (J16) |
| Increasing fathers' temporal flexibility (J22) | Reduces the likelihood of mothers being prescribed antianxiety medication (J13) |