We provide novel evidence on the causal impact of a child's health shock on parents' labor market outcomes. Using high-quality Finnish and Norwegian administrative data, we construct counterfactuals for treated households with families who experience the same shock in later years. We find a sharp break in mothers' earnings trajectories after the event, while we do not find significant effects for fathers. Our findings do not align with the hypothesis of household specialization explaining these adjustments. Instead, the evidence suggests that these changes are driven by increased caregiving demands, with mothers bearing the primary burden. We also document a substantial impact on parents' mental well-being.

We investigate the causal impact of a generous unconditional cash transfer at birth on children’s health and academic performance. Using rich administrative data, we take advantage of the unexpected introduction of a baby bonus in Spain in 2007 and implement a difference-in-discontinuity approach comparing children born in the surrounding months in different years. We find little impact on children’s health and test scores. We also fail to find meaningful changes in household structure, maternal employment, parental time, or child-related monetary investments. Our results contribute to understanding which interventions are effective at fostering children’s health and human capital formation.

Does information about the long-run financial costs of reduced labor supply increase mothers’ working hours? We document descriptively that long-term financial factors are not top of mind when mothers decide on their employment level. Moreover, a substantial share of women holds overly optimistic expectations about pension receipt and wage growth under part-time work. In a large-scale field experiment in Switzerland, we randomly assign mothers working part-time as teachers to receive objective information about the long-run costs of reduced labor supply. The treatment increases both demand for financial information and future labor supply plans, in particular among women who underestimate the costs of part-time work. Leveraging linked employer administrative data one year post-intervention, we find that this group of mothers increases working hours by 7%. These findings underscore that policies reducing information frictions in labor supply decisions may help address remaining gender gaps in the labor market.