Daniel Avdic (CINCH, University Duisburg-Essen)

There is a growing literature on the impacts of maternity leave programs on women’s labor market outcomes, fertility, and children’s outcomes. Much less is known about the impacts of paternity leave. Using Swedish register data, we analyze the differential roles of father’s and mother’s parental inputs for children’s compulsory school and health-related outcomes by exploiting the implementation of the Swedish “daddy-month” reform in 1995 in a Difference-in-RD framework. Results show that children of lower-educated fathers obtain lower compulsory school grades while the reverse is true for fathers of higher-educated children. The former effect is driven by boys while there is no clear sex-specific difference for the latter. Furthermore, we find suggestive evidence that risky health behavior of girls of lower-educated fathers changed as a consequence of the reform.