Working Paper: NBER ID: w25902
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: paternal leave; workplace flexibility; maternal health; postpartum recovery; Sweden
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 |
|---|---|
| Fathers' temporal flexibility (J22) | Mothers' likelihood of experiencing physical postpartum health complications (J12) |
| Fathers' temporal flexibility (J22) | Mothers' likelihood of receiving an antibiotic prescription in the first six months postpartum (J19) |
| Fathers' temporal flexibility (J22) | Mothers' likelihood of receiving any antianxiety prescription in the first three months postpartum (I19) |