Seminar: Raquel Fernandez, New York University
- Date: 26 May 2025, 13:15–14:30
- Location: Ekonomikum, F433
- Type: Seminar
- Lecturer: Raquel Fernandez
- Organiser: Nationalekonomiska institutionen
We are happy to welcome Raquel Fernandez (NYU) to our department seminar. Her research focuses on economic inequality, cultural economics, and gender economics, among other topics. Many of us are likely familiar with, and have built upon, her seminal work on women's labor force participation, fertility decisions, and cultural beliefs/norms, for example Fernandez, Fogli, and Olivetti (2004) and Fernandez and Fogli (2009).
Abstract
Parental Leave: Economic Incentives and Cultural Change
(with James Albrecht, Jiwon Lee, Per-Anders Edin, Peter Thoursie, and Susan Vroman)
In 2002, Sweden reformed its parental leave system by adding a second “daddy month,” i.e., a second month of pay-related parental leave reserved exclusively for each parent. In addition to giving fathers an economic incentive to take more leave, this change had an effect on cultural norms. We develop and estimate a model of the household in which preferences towards leave depend on the behavior of one's peers and use it to quantify the magnitudes of the economic-incentive effects as well as the evolving norms. We find that endogenously evolving cultural norms play a major role. We use our model to evaluate the effects of several potential policy changes including decreasing the cost of child care and giving each parent a non-transferable endowment of parental leave and conclude that only the latter would have a significant effect on the share of parental leave taken by men.