Do Family Policies Reduce Gender Inequality? Evidence from 60 Years of Policy Experimentation

Event Date: 30 September 2020

Speaker: Roland Rathelot, University of Warwick

Time: 4.00-5.00pm

Abstract: Do  family  policies  reduce  gender  inequality  in  the  labor  market?  We  contribute  to  this  debate  by investigating the  joint  impact  of  parental  leave  and  child  care,  using  administrative  data  covering the labor market and birth histories of 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   building on   Kleven,   Landais   and  Søgaard   (2019)   to   compute counterfactual gender inequality series. Our results show that the enormous expansions of parental leave and child care subsidies have had virtually no impact on gender convergence.

Published: 8 April 2021