IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/jku/econwp/2026-06.html

The Right to Parental Part-Time Work: Workplace Flexibility and the Costs of Motherhood

Author

Listed:
  • Lea-Karla Matic
  • Johanna Luise Reuter

Abstract

Part-time work is a policy margin through which governments seek to reconcile employment and family responsibilities, yet its broader effects remain poorly understood. We estimate the effects of Austria’s 2004 introduction of a legal right to parental part-time work for mothers in firms with more than 20 employees. Using administrative data and a triple-differencein-differences design, we find large, persistent increases in part-time employment but only modest, short-lived gains in labor market attachment. Adjustment instead occurs through greater retention with the pre-birth employer and higher subsequent fertility, alongside persistent earnings losses and adverse short-run effects on maternal mental health.

Suggested Citation

  • Lea-Karla Matic & Johanna Luise Reuter, 2026. "The Right to Parental Part-Time Work: Workplace Flexibility and the Costs of Motherhood," Economics working papers 2026-06, Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
    • Handle: RePEc:jku:econwp:2026-06
    Note: English
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.jku.at/fileadmin/gruppen/117/WorkingPapers/econ/2026/wp2606.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D1 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior
    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General
    • J12 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
    • J22 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Time Allocation and Labor Supply

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jku:econwp:2026-06. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: René Böheim (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vlinzat.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.