Do family policies reduce gender inequality? Evidence from 60 years of policy experimentation
Kleven, H. J., Landais, C.
, Posch, J., Steinhauer, A. & Zweimüller, J.
(2024).
Do family policies reduce gender inequality? Evidence from 60 years of policy experimentation.
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy,
16(2), 110 - 149.
https://doi.org/10.1257/pol.20210346
, Posch, J., Steinhauer, A. & Zweimüller, J.
(2024).
Do family policies reduce gender inequality? Evidence from 60 years of policy experimentation.
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy,
16(2), 110 - 149.
https://doi.org/10.1257/pol.20210346
Do family policies reduce gender inequality in the labor market? We contribute to this debate by investigating the joint impact of parental leave and childcare, using administrative data covering Austrian workers over more than half a century. We start by quasi-experimentally identifying the causal effects of all family policy reforms since the 1950s on the full dynamics of male and female earnings. We then map these causal estimates into a decomposition framework to compute counterfactual gender inequality series. Our results show that the enormous expansions of parental leave and childcare have had virtually no impact on gender convergence.
Explore Further
- D63 - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
- J13 - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
- J16 - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination
- J31 - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials by Skill, Training, Occupation, etc.
- J32 - Nonwage Labor Costs and Benefits; Private Pensions
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Landais, C., Kleven, H., Posch, J., Steinhauer, A. & Zweimüller, J.
(2024).
Data and code for: Do Family Policies Reduce Gender Inequality? Evidence from 60 Years of Policy Experimentation.
[Dataset]. OpenICPSR.
https://doi.org/10.3886/e186541