Discussion paper

DP15437 Do Family Policies Reduce Gender Inequality? Evidence from 60 Years of Policy Experimentation

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 a la Kleven, Landais and Søgaard (2019) to compute
counterfactual gender gaps. Our results show that the enormous expansions of
parental leave and child care subsidies have had virtually no impact on gender
convergence.

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Citation

Kleven, H, C Landais, J Posch, A Steinhauer and J Zweimüller (2020), ‘DP15437 Do Family Policies Reduce Gender Inequality? Evidence from 60 Years of Policy Experimentation‘, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 15437. CEPR Press, Paris & London. https://cepr.org/publications/dp15437