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By the early 21st century, most high-income countries have put into effect a host of generous and virtually gender-neutral parental leave policies and family benefits, with the multiple goals of gender equity, higher fertility, and child development. What have been the effects? Proponents typically emphasize the contribution of family policies to the goals of gender equity and child development, enabling women to combine careers and motherhood, and altering social norms regarding gender roles. Opponents often warn that family policies may become a long-term hindrance to women's careers because of the loss of work experience and the higher costs to employers that hire women of childbearing age. We draw lessons from existing work and our own analysis on the effects of parental leave and other interventions aimed at aiding families. We present country- and micro-level evidence on the effects of family policy on gender outcomes, focusing on female employment, gender gaps in earnings, and fertility. Most estimates range from negligible to a small positive impact. But the verdict is far more positive for the beneficial impact of spending on early education and child care.

We assess the case for generous government-funded maternity leave, focusing on a series of policy reforms in Norway that expanded paid leave from 18 to 35 weeks. We find the reforms do not crowd out unpaid leave and that mothers spend more time at home without a reduction in family income. The increased maternity leave has little effect on children's schooling, parental earnings and labor force participation, completed fertility, marriage, or divorce. The expansions, whose net costs amounted to 0.25% of GDP, have negative redistribution properties and imply a considerable increases in taxes at a cost to economic efficiency.

This article analyzes the impact of five major expansions in maternity leave coverage in Germany on mothers’ labor market outcomes after childbirth. To identify the causal impact of the reforms, we use a difference-in-difference design that compares labor market outcomes of mothers who give birth shortly before and shortly after a change in maternity leave legislation in years of policy changes and years when no changes have taken place. Each expansion in leave coverage reduced mothers’ postbirth employment rates in the short run. The longer-run effects of the expansions on mothers’ postbirth labor market outcomes are, however, small.

This article investigates whether schooling outcomes at age 15 are affected by the duration of maternity leave, i.e. the time mothers spend at home with their new-born before returning to work. We exploit an unanticipated reform in Austria which extended the maximum duration of paid and job protected parental leave from 12 to 24 months for births as of 1 July, 1990. Using PISA data from the cohorts 1990 and 1987, we find no significant overall impact of the parental leave extension on standardised test scores. However, subgroup analyses reveal strong heterogeneity by maternal education and child gender.

This paper analyzes the effects of changes in the duration of paid, job-protected parental leave on mothers' higher-order fertility and postbirth labor market careers. Identification is based on a major Austrian reform increasing the duration of parental leave from one year to two years for any child born on or after July 1, 1990. We find that mothers who give birth to their first child immediately after the reform have more second children than prereform mothers, and that extended parental leave significantly reduces return to work. Employment and earnings also decrease in the short run, but not in the long run. Fertility and work responses vary across the population in ways suggesting that both cash transfers and job protection are relevant. Increasing parental leave for a future child increases fertility strongly but leaves short-run postbirth careers relatively unaffected. Partially reversing the 1990 extension, a second 1996 reform improves employment and earnings while compressing the time between births.

We examine the impact of the introduction of paid maternity leave in Norway in 1977 on maternal health in the medium and long term. Using administrative data combined with survey data on the health of women around age 40, we find the reform improved a range of maternal health outcomes, including BMI, blood pressure, pain, and mental health. The reform also increased health-promoting behaviors, such as exercise and not smoking. The effects were larger for first-time and low-resource mothers and women who would have taken little unpaid leave in the absence of the reform.

OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to describe occupational, industrial, and temporal trends in relation to absence during pregnancy in the Danish workforce. METHODS: The register-based national cohort DOC*X-Generation was used to identify all pregnancies among women (18–50 years) engaged in regular employment in Denmark 1998–2018. The cohort holds individual-level data on occupations coded according to the Danish versions of the International Standard Classification of Occupations and of EU’s nomenclature (NACE, revision 2). Data on absence from work was retrieved from the Danish Register for Evaluation and Marginalization. The study population comprised 884 616 pregnancies in 547 870 women. RESULTS: In 48% of the included pregnancies, the women had at least one week with registered absence with a median of 8 weeks (5–95% percentile; 1–27 weeks). The highest frequencies of absence were observed among painters (75%) and women in the meat products manufacturing industry (68%), whereas the lowest were seen among professionals in physics, mathematics, engineering, and architecture (30%) and in the research and university education industry (32%). The difference between the lowest and highest number of cumulated weeks with absence was 9 weeks. From 1998–2018, the proportion of pregnancies with registered absence decreased, whereas the extent of absence per pregnancy increased. CONCLUSIONS: Absence during pregnancy was consistently high over time, but with vast differences across occupations and industries. A deeper understanding of underlying reasons for pregnancy-related absence is essential to develop targeted strategies for reducing absence, such as providing better opportunities for adjustments of work task early in pregnancy or other tailored interventions.

In this paper, we account for the direct and indirect effects of maternity leave entitlements on female labor force participation. We first explore theoretically the impact of maternity leave duration on female labor supply in the presence of fertility decisions. We assume that maternity leave duration affects female labor supply through two main channels: reducing the time cost of female market work, and reducing women’s earnings. Our theoretical model allows for non-monotonic effects of leave duration on female labor supply. We test the predictions of our model using an unbalanced panel of 159 countries for the years 1994, 2004, and 2011. We confirm the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between maternity leave duration and female participation, and find a maternity leave threshold of around 30 weeks above which female participation falls. Below this threshold, increasing maternity leave increases female labor force participation because the positive effect due to the reduction of work–time cost of employed mothers strongly dominates the negative wage penalty effect. Beyond this threshold, the opposite happens. Our analysis also confirms the relevance of social norms for female labor supply throughout the world.

This paper quantifies the effects of Russia’s 1981 expansion in maternity benefits on completed childbearing. The program provided one year of partially paid parental leave and a small cash transfer upon a child’s birth. I exploit the program’s two-stage implementation and find evidence that women had more children as a result of the program. Fertility rates rose immediately by 8.2% over twelve months. The increase in fertility rates not only persisted for the ten-year duration of the program, but it reflected large increases in higher-order births to older women who already had children before the program started.

This paper evaluates the impact of three major expansions in maternity leave coverage in Germany on children's long-run outcomes. To identify the causal impact of the reforms, we use a difference-in-difference design that compares outcomes of children born shortly before and shortly after a change in maternity leave legislation in years of policy changes, and in years when no changes have taken place. We find no support for the hypothesis that the expansions in leave coverage improved children's outcomes, despite a strong impact on mothers' return to work behavior after childbirth.