Working Paper: CEPR ID: DP15437
Authors: Henrik Kleven; Camille Landais; Johanna Posch; Andreas Steinhauer; Josef Zweimüller
Abstract: Do family policies reduce gender inequality in the labor market? We contributeto this debate by investigating the joint impact of parental leave and child care, usingadministrative data covering the labor market and birth histories of Austrianworkers over more than half a century. We start by quasi-experimentally identifyingthe causal effects of all family policy reforms since the 1950s on the fulldynamics of male and female earnings. We then map these causal estimates intoa decomposition framework a la Kleven, Landais and Søgaard (2019) to computecounterfactual gender gaps. Our results show that the enormous expansions ofparental leave and child care subsidies have had virtually no impact on genderconvergence.
Keywords: No keywords provided
JEL Codes: J16; J13; J18
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| parental leave policies (J22) | women's earnings outcomes (J31) |
| family policy reforms (J18) | gender inequality in the labor market (J70) |
| average earnings of Austrian women (J31) | average earnings of men (J31) |
| expansions in child care provision (J13) | women's earnings relative to men's (J31) |
| expansion of parental leave duration (J22) | women's earnings relative to men's (J31) |
| expansion of parental leave duration (J22) | women's long-term earnings trajectories (J31) |