We use data from the Canadian Workplace and Employee Survey (1999-2002) to assess the take-up of family-friendly benefits that are provided by employers. We distinguish between availability and actual use of benefits to account for worker selection into firms according to benefit availability. We find that selection is important for understanding the takeup of family-friendly benefits, although it does not differ much between genders. We also find that the provision of these benefits helps workers relatively little to manage the work-family conflict and benefits are often unavailable to those who need them most. Our findings suggest that the market fails to help employees balance their family-work conflict.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by UBC Department of Economics in its series CLSRN Working Papers with number
clsrn_admin-2009-47.