We study how the duration of paid parental leave affects the accumulation of cognitive skills among children. We use a reform which extended parental leave benefits from 12 to 15 months for Swedish children born after August 1988 to evaluate the effects of prolonged parental leave on children’s test scores and grades at age 16. We show that, on average, the reform had no effect on children’s scholastic performance. However, we do find positive effects for children of well-educated mothers, a result that is robust to a number of different specifications. We find no corresponding heterogeneity relative to parental earnings or fathers’ education, or relative to other predictors of child performance. We find no effects on intermediate outcomes such as mothers’ subsequent earnings, child health, parental fertility, divorce rates, or the mothers’ mental health. Overall the results suggest positive causal interaction effects between mothers’ education and the amount of time mothers spend with their children. Since the institutional context is one in which the alternative is subsidized day care, the results imply that subsidizing longer parental leave spells rather than day care reinforce the relationship between maternal education and school outcomes.
Download Info
To our knowledge, this item is not available for
download. To find whether it is available, there are three
options:
1. Check below under "Related research" whether another version of this item is available online.
2. Check on the provider's web page
whether it is in fact available.
3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be
available.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by IFAU - Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation in its series Working Paper Series with number
2009:14.
Length: 39 pages Date of creation: 09 Jun 2009 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:hhs:ifauwp:2009_014
Contact details of provider: Postal: Labour Market Policy Evaluation, P O Box 513, SE-751 20 Uppsala, Sweden Phone: (+46) 18 - 471 70 70 Fax: (+46) 18 - 471 70 71 Email: Web page: http://www.ifau.se/ More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Margareta Wicklander).
Find related papers by JEL classification: I21 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Analysis of Education J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth J24 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: