• DOI:10.26481/umagsb.2018025
• Corpus ID: 54950591

Becoming a mompreneur: Parental leave policies and mothers' propensity for self-employment

@article{Gerards2018BecomingAM,
  title={Becoming a mompreneur: Parental leave policies and mothers' propensity for self-employment},
  author={Ruud Gerards and Pomme Theunissen},
  journal={research memorandum},
  year={2018}
}

• Ruud Gerards, Pomme Theunissen
• Published 4 December 2018
• Economics
• research memorandum

Contractionary parental leave policy reforms decrease the time mothers can stay at home after giving birth. This might discourage them to become an entrepreneur. Exploiting a German parental leave policy reform, we apply a regression discontinuity approach to establish a causal relationship between parental leave policies and the probability for mothers to become entrepreneurs (i.e., “mompreneurs”). We find that a decrease in the generosity of parental leave lowers the odds of mothers to become self-employed by 17%. We show additional evidence that suggests that this is particularly due to the reduced period of paid parental leave.