Working Paper: NBER ID: w28082
Authors: Henrik Kleven; Camille Landais; Johanna Posch; Andreas Steinhauer; Josef Zweimüller
Abstract: Do family policies reduce gender inequality in the labor market? We contribute to this debate by investigating the joint impact of parental leave and child care, using administrative data covering the labor market and birth histories of Austrian workers over more than half a century. We start by quasi-experimentally identifying the causal effects of all family policy reforms since the 1950s, including the introduction of maternal leave benefits in 1961, on the full dynamics of male and female earnings. We then use these causal estimates to compute gender inequality series for counterfactual scenarios regarding the evolution of family policies. Our results show that the enormous expansions of parental leave and child care subsidies have had virtually no impact on gender convergence.
Keywords: Gender Inequality; Family Policies; Parental Leave; Child Care; Labor Market
JEL Codes: H31; H42; J08; J13; J16; J18; J22
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Child care expansions (J13) | Women's earnings relative to men's (J31) |
| Parental leave and child care subsidies (J13) | Gender convergence in labor market (J21) |
| Child care expansions (J13) | Long-term gender earnings gaps (J31) |
| Family policies (J12) | Gender convergence (J16) |
| Parental leave duration (J22) | Women's earnings relative to men's (J31) |
| Parental leave duration (J22) | Long-term gender earnings gaps (J31) |