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Intra‐household allocation of parental leave
Author(s) -
Gobbi Paula E.,
Parys Juliane,
Schwerhoff Gregor
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
canadian journal of economics/revue canadienne d'économique
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.773
H-Index - 69
eISSN - 1540-5982
pISSN - 0008-4085
DOI - 10.1111/caje.12322
Subject(s) - economics , demographic economics , consumption (sociology) , distribution (mathematics) , duration (music) , parental leave , human capital , time allocation , pareto principle , labour economics , economic growth , operations management , work (physics) , art , mathematical analysis , social science , mechanical engineering , mathematics , literature , management , sociology , engineering
We introduce childcare sharing in a collective model of household behaviour to investigate which factors make spouses increase or decrease their share of parental leave. The concern about future consumption motivates parents to invest in their human capital and to limit their leave duration. Using relative income and the age difference between spouses as distribution factors, we cannot reject Pareto efficiency in childcare sharing. Higher relative incomes and larger age differences shift the conditional leave allocation towards the relatively poorer and younger partner, respectively. Households with higher total income purchase more professional childcare.