Working Papers

(Received Best Third Year Paper Award at NYU and Best Paper Prize at 2023 HILDA Survey Research Conference)

(with J. Albrecht, P-A Edin, R. Fernández, P. Thoursie, S. Vroman), NBER Working Paper

The distribution of parental leave uptake and childcare activities continues to conform to traditional gender roles. In 2002, with the goal of increasing gender equality, Sweden added a second “daddy month,” i.e., an additional month of pay-related parental leave reserved exclusively for each parent. This policy increased men’s parental leave uptake and decreased women’s, thereby increasing men’s share. To understand how various factors contributed to these outcomes, we develop and estimate a quantitative model of the household in which preferences towards parental leave respond to peer behavior. We distinguish households by the education of the parents and ask the model to match key features of the parental leave distribution before and after the reform by gender and household type (the parents’ education). We find that changed incentives and, especially, changed social norms played an important role in generating these outcomes whereas changed wage parameters, including the future wage penalty associated with different lengths of parental leave uptake, were minor contributors. We then use our model to evaluate three counterfactual policies designed to increase men’s share of parental leave and conclude that giving each parent a non-transferable endowment of parental leave or only paying for the length of time equally taken by each parent would both dramatically increase men’s share whereas decreasing childcare costs has almost no effect.

(with K. Babiarz, G. Miller, T. N. Peng, C. Valente), Center for Global Development Working Paper. Media Coverage: The Economist, Malay Mail

Although family planning programs can improve women’s welfare directly through changes in realized fertility, they may also have important incentive effects by increasing parents’ investments in girls not yet fertile. Exploiting the staggered implementation of family planning programs in Malaysia during the 1960s and 1970s among girls of varying ages, we study these potential incentive effects, finding that family planning may have raised raise girls’ educational attainment substantially. We also find that these early investments are linked to gains in women’s paid labor at prime working ages and to greater support for women’s elderly parents (a marker for women’s bargaining power within the household). Notably, these incentive effects may be larger than the direct effects of family planning alone.

(with K. Babiarz, G. Miller, T. N. Peng, C. Valente), Center for Global Development Working Paper

There is longstanding debate about the contribution of family planning programs to fertility decline. Studying the staggered introduction of family planning across Malaysia during the 1960s and 1970s, we find modest responses in fertility behavior. Higher (but not lower) parity birth hazards declined by one-quarter—but imply only a 5 percent decline in the overall annual probability of birth. Age at marriage rose by 0.48 years, but birth spacing conditional on this did not otherwise change. Overall, Malaysia’s total fertility rate declined by about one quarter birth under family planning, explaining only about 10 percent of the national fertility decline between 1960 and 1988. Our findings are consistent with growing evidence that global fertility decline is predominantly due to underlying changes in the demand for children

Work in Progress