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Paternal childcare and parental leave policies: evidence from industrialized countries

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Abstract

This paper merges data from the Multinational Time Use Study (MTUS) with national parental leave characteristics from eight industrialized countries from 1971 to 2005 to estimate the association between national parental leave arrangements and paternal childcare. We also test whether this association varies according to a father’s educational level. We find that the number of parental leave weeks available to fathers and high rates of benefit are positively associated with fathers’ childcare time. This is generally robust when taking into account country and year as fixed effects, and other country-specific variables such as female employment rates. The magnitudes of the coefficients are economically significant. For example, high parental leave benefits compared to none are associated with an increase of almost 1 h per week in paternal childcare time. This relationship between benefit rate and time spent on childcare is strongest for highly educated fathers. They also benefit the most from exclusive ‘daddy weeks’ whereas the positive association of transferable leave to paternal childcare is solely driven by lowly educated fathers.

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Notes

  1. We do not consider either maternity leave, i.e., leave for mothers typically covering some weeks before and after the child’s birth and usually paid at 100 % of the former wage, or paternity leave, defined as the few days or weeks fathers can take off work around the birth. Due to their short duration, these policies are not expected to have a long-lasting effect on paternal childcare time. See, for example, OECD (2011) for an overview of maternity and paternity leave characteristics in OECD countries.

  2. In Finland (since 1990, ‘home-care allowance’) and in Norway (since 1998, ‘child-care cash benefit’) parents could stay at home subsequent to parental leave to provide full-time care to their child until its third birthday while receiving a flat-rate benefit (Neyer et al. 2006).

  3. The system underwent a pivotal reform in 2007, using the Swedish system as paragon. But as the time-use data of our analysis refer to the period of the former legislation, we refer to Reich (2011) for a description of the new system.

  4. For several countries, more than one diary day is recorded. In order to account for these differences, individuals are clustered in the estimation procedure.

  5. Other aspects of parental leave legislation, e.g., prerequisites for being able to use it and flexibility in shifting it to later years, are not considered in the analysis. Most men would probably meet pre-birth employment requirements due to the generally high labor market attachment of men. Regarding flexibility of parental leave entitlement according to the child’s age, most leave has to be taken immediately after the birth, or at least before the child’s third birthday (see overview and country notes in Moss 2011). For leave that can be used even later, there is evidence that parental leave is still mostly taken shortly after the child’s birth (see Chronholm et al. 2007 for Sweden, for instance).

  6. Housework includes common housework chores such as washing clothes, vacuum cleaning etc. It does not include shopping and gardening. Cooking (including food preparation, baking, preserving food, setting table, washing dishes etc.) is distinguished from other household work as it is a time-inflexible chore and hence differs from other household chores in terms of its predictors.

  7. There is great variety in public childcare provisions at the regional level in several countries, see Del Boca et al. (2005) for Italy, Krapf (2009) for Sweden and Statistische Ämter des Bundes und der Länder (2007) for Germany. Data is not available on the regional level for all countries for every survey 1971–2005, nor are regions included in the MTUS data.

  8. As fathers’ childcare time is correlated with their housework time (Reich 2013), we also ran regressions with minutes of housework as the dependent variable. In the model that controls for country and time fixed effects, as well as the additional macro-level indicators, we find a negative correlation between exclusive parental leave weeks for fathers and their housework time, while the coefficients of the other parental leave characteristics are not significant. We also estimated the childcare time for mothers, and the results of the ‘full’ model (with independent variables as in model O4) show that parental leave exclusively for fathers is negatively, and moderate or high benefit rates are positively correlated with mothers’ childcare time. More information is available from the authors upon request.

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Table 5 Countries, survey years and parental leave policies for fathers

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Boll, C., Leppin, J. & Reich, N. Paternal childcare and parental leave policies: evidence from industrialized countries. Rev Econ Household 12, 129–158 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-013-9211-z

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