• Corpus ID: 53008125

The Father ’ s Quota : An Earnings Equalizer ? 1

@inproceedings{Hart2016TheF,
  title={The Father ’ s Quota : An Earnings Equalizer ? 1},
  author={Rannveig Kaldager Hart and Syn{\o}ve Nygaard Andersen and Nina Eirin Drange},
  year={2016}
}

• R. Hart, S. Andersen, N. Drange
• Published 2016
• Economics

Parental leave quotas reserved for the father may change the distribution of paid and unpaid work in the family, but we lack empirical evidence of whether this in turn reduces the wage-gap between mothers and fathers. This paper uses an extension of the Norwegian father’s quota from 6 to 10 weeks to estimate the causal effect of paternity leave on three outcomes; the parental leave uptake by both mothers and fathers, the long-term earnings of both mothers and fathers, and the degree of specialization within couples. We identify causal effects by way of a regression discontinuity design, using full population data from Norwegian administrative registers. We restrict our sample to parents of children in a two month window around the reform, where the mother had earnings the year prior to the reform (N=7552). The results show that the reform significantly increased the number of leave days taken by fathers. We find no effects on earnings and couple specialization in the year following the reform in the full sample, nor in subsample analysis. 1 We are grateful to Trude Lappegård and Hege Marie Gjefsen for helpful comments and suggestions. 2 Research Department , Statistics Norway. Email: [e-mail] 3 Research Department, Statistics Norway. Email: [e-mail] 4 Research Department, Statistics Norway. Email: [e-mail]