Paternity Leave and Children's Long-Run Educational Outcomes

Abstract: How a couple shares parental leave following the birth of a child has important implications for time investments in children by each parent. Using a parental leave reform in Sweden that reserved a month of paid leave to each parent, I study the effects of increasing father’s participation in parental leave on children’s long-run educational outcome. The causal effect of the reform is identified using a ”difference-in-discontinuities” strategy that combines the before/after variation with the discontinuous below/above variation. The results provide tentative evidence that children’s long-run educational outcome improves as a result of the reform. I also show that the positive effect is mainly stemming from families where the father is highly educated irrespective of the education level of the mother. This highlights the importance of father-child time for children’s development.