Over the last decades many OECD countries introduced parental leave regulations in order to counteract low and decreasing birth rates. In general, these regulations aim at making parenthood more attractive and more compatible with a working career, especially for women. The recent German...

From the mid 1980's, the Canadian government froze or cut back the major traditional provisions targeted towards families with children. Faced with the lowest (and declining) fertility rate in Canada, the government of the province of Québec (where the population is mostly French) decided in...

In 2007, Germany implemented a generous parental leave regulation in order to make parenthood more attractive and more compatible with a working career, especially for mothers. We evaluate the reform using a natural experiment that compares outcomes of parents with children born shortly after...

Women account for the majority of parental leave take-up, which is likely one of the major reasons for the gender gap in income and wages. Consequently, many countries exert effort to promote a more gender equal division of parental leave. Indeed, the last decades have seen an increase in...

Women account for the majority of parental leave take-up, which is likely one of the major reasons for the gender gap in income and wages. Consequently, many countries exert effort to promote a more gender equal division of parental leave. Indeed, the last decades have seen an increase in...

In 2002 the number of months reserved for fathers in the Swedish parental leave system increased from one to two. This coincided with an increase of total time of parental leave from 12 to 13 months. The results are obtained using a natural experiment approach, comparing the behavior of parents...

This paper evaluates the effect of extended maternal care on children's development at age 4 and 5 using observational data prior to and after the Canadian parental leave reform, which extended total paid leave from 25 to 50 weeks. In contrast with previous research on the Canadian parental...

In this paper, we provide evidence of whether child spacing affects the future success of children. As an exogenous source of variation in child spacing, we make use of the introduction of an administrative rule in the parental leave benefit system in Sweden. This rule made it possible for a...

We address the relationship between family policies and fertility in Norway, including three somewhat different policies: parental leave, formal childcare, and the childcare cash benefit. Norwegian family policy has been considered dualistic, giving priority to both dual-earner support and...

This paper reviews the research on the effects of the recent reform of the parental leave benefit system (Elterngeld) in Germany on fertility. I start with a brief discussion of the economic incentives of the reform and their potential effects on fertility from a theoretical perspective. Then I...