Seminar in Economics | with Thomas H. Jorgensen
Welcome to this Higher Seminar in Economics organized by the Department of Economics, SSE. The seminar speaker is Thomas H. Jorgensen, an Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen.Who will present
"The Division of Parental Leave: Empirical Evidence and Policy Design" (with Jakob Egholt Søgaard )
Abstract
We study several key aspects of the design of parental leave systems. First, we estimate parents' willingness to pay for parental leave using Danish register data on the division of leave from almost 190,000 births combined with sharp variation in economic incentives created by the parental leave benefit system. We find evidence of both strong behavioral responses with significant bunching at kink points and a willingness to pay for a gender-traditional allocation of leave, where fathers take little or no leave. Second, we provide a menu of counterfactual policy simulations showing substantial interaction effects between earmarked leave, replacement rates and the duration of leave benefits. Relevant for the implementation of a recent EU directive, a higher replacement rate significantly increases the behavioral response of fathers to earmarked leave. Finally, we discuss the welfare effects of different policies aimed at increasing the parental leave of fathers.
More about the Speaker
The seminar takes place at Stockholm School of Economics, Sveavägen 65, room A750.
Please contact nicola.donohoe@hhs.se if you have any questions.