Journal of Labor Economics Vol. 38 No. 3 2020
H. Gregg Lewis Prize
Abstract
Previous articleNext article FreeH. Gregg Lewis PrizePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe H. Gregg Lewis Prize for the best paper published in the Journal of Labor Economics during 2018–19 has been awarded to Ankita Patnaik for “Reserving Time for Daddy: The Consequences of Fathers’ Quotas,” which appeared in the October 2019 issue of the Journal.The Prize Committee consisted of Marianne Page (chair), William Kerr, and Petra Todd. The relationships between the division of household labor, formal childcare, and the gender gap in wages have long been of interest to labor economists. Patnaik’s study focuses on the potentially important role of fathers’ involvement in early childcare and the ways in which well-designed family leave policies might influence these relationships. Previous studies have shown that a disproportionate amount of housework is done by women and that this contributes to the gender pay gap. As a result, men’s involvement at home has received increasing public attention, and some countries have enacted family leave policies that incentivize father’s participation in parental leave. Little is known, however, about what types of incentives will be most successful in getting parents to share leave more equally or what the long-run impacts of successful short-term policies might be.Patnaik leverages a natural experiment generated by the 2006 introduction of the Quebec Parental Insurance Plan to provide the first causal analysis of the shorter- and longer-term consequences of a policy aimed at promoting paternity leave. This policy established a nontransferable right to 5 weeks of leave for fathers at the time of their child’s birth. Using both regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences designs that exploit the fact that other provinces did not make similar changes in their family leave policies, Patnaik finds that the Quebec Parental Insurance Plan was very effective. Fathers’ leave claims increased by 53 percentage points, and fathers’ leave duration increased by 3 weeks.The committee was impressed with the author’s thorough analysis of a novel policy event, the employment of multiple methodological approaches, and her detailed exploration of mechanisms. What excited us most, however, was her follow-up analysis with time diary data, which shows that the policy-induced increase in fathers’ leave taking had a persistent impact several years after the birth, shifting households more toward a dual-caregiver, dual-earner model. This is an important finding because it suggests that small changes in initial parenting experiences can have long-lasting effects on parents’ behavior and that there may not need to be a trade-off between gender equality in the labor market and parental investments in children. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Volume 38, Number 3July 2020 Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709396 © 2020 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
- DOI
- 10.1086/709396
- Volume
- 38
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- xi-xi
- Language
- en
- Sources
- openalex crossref