Father’s parental leave timing: promotion opportunities and workplace norms

Abstract

Paternity leave reforms have consistently increased fathers’ leave-taking but have done little to reduce gender gaps in the labor market. We study a Finnish paternity leave reform that made the use of paternity leave more flexible over the child’s first years but did not increase the number of earmarked days. Using this reform as a natural experiment, we explore its effects on fathers’ leave take-up and labor market outcomes for parents. While we find that the reform significantly increased fathers’ take-up of parental leave without the mother, we observe no effect in the labor market outcomes for parents. We further examine fathers’ leave-taking patterns that could explain the negligible impact on gender gaps. We show that fathers use their parental leave during holiday periods, such as the summer months and the end of the year. Fathers with a higher predicted promotion probability respond less to the reform, take less additional leave, and slightly increase the share of leave taken during holidays. By contrast, there is no significant difference in the take-up responses at workplaces with stronger paternity leave-taking norms.

• ISSN: 2984-2158 (Online)
• ISBN: 978-952-209-247-2 (Online)
• JEL: J13, J16, J18, J22, J31, M51
• Publication in PDF-format