LabFam seminar series: Does Paid Parental Leave Help or Hurt Mothers’ Economic Progress?
Astrid Kunze, Norwegian School of Economics
We examine the long-run impact of government-funded paid parental leave extensions on the likelihood that mothers reach top-pay jobs and executive positions. Our focus is on a series of policy reforms in Norway that expanded paid maternity leave from short to long leave, that is 18 to 38 weeks, and introduced a quota of five weeks reserved to fathers. Our estimates show that, up to a quarter of a century after childbirth, such reforms neither help nor hurt mothers’ chances to be at the top of their companies’ pay ranking or in leadership positions. The expansions had no differential effect on intra-firm pay success across a number of characteristics, such as maternal education, number of children, firm size, and industry. They also left unaffected other outcomes which could have led to a change in within-firm pay ranking, including hours worked, internal promotions, and job mobility. None of the reforms affected fathers’ pay. Finally, the leave reforms had no effect on the gender pay gaps between mothers and their male colleagues whether at the top or across the whole pay distribution within their companies. The same null result emerges in the case of the pay differentials between mothers and their partners.
Abut the speaker:
Astrid Kunze is Professor of Economics at the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen, Norway. From 2000 to 2002, she was employed as a Research Associate at IZA. She holds a Ph.D. from University College London and an MSc from University of Bielefeld. She also did a traineeship in business economics with Bayer AG Leverkusen. She spent two longer-term research visits in 2006/2007 and 2013/2014 at IZA as a Visiting Research Fellow.
Her main research interests are labour economics and applied micro-econometrics. She is particularly interested in the causal effects of public policies on labour market behavior. Kunze has conducted studies on the evaluation of parental leave policies, child care programmes and cash-for care policies, as well as gender quotas on boards. Another area of her research covers aspects of organizations and diversity in the firm. In her empirical research, she uses large register data applying micro-econometric methods.