When Dad Can Stay Home: Fathers' Workplace Flexibility and Maternal Health

Arbeitspapier

While workplace flexibility is perceived to be a key determinant of maternal labor supply, less is known about fathers' demand for flexibility or about intra-household spillover effects of flexibility initiatives. This paper examines these issues in the context of a critical period in family life — the months immediately following childbirth — and identifies the impacts of paternal access to workplace flexibility on maternal postpartum health. We model household demand for paternal presence at home as a function of domestic stochastic shocks, and use variation from a Swedish reform that granted new fathers more flexibility to take intermittent parental leave during the postpartum period in a regression discontinuity difference-in-differences (RD-DD) design. We find that increasing the father's temporal flexibility reduces the risk of the mother experiencing physical postpartum health complications and improves her mental health. Our results suggest that mothers bear the burden from a lack of workplace flexibility — not only directly through greater career costs of family formation, as previously documented — but also indirectly, as fathers' inability to respond to domestic shocks exacerbates the maternal health costs of childbearing.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 12386

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Health Behavior ; Health: Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health ; General Welfare; Well-Being ; Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure; Domestic Abuse ; Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth ; Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs: Public Policy
• Subject: workplace flexibility ; intra-household spillovers ; maternal postpartum health ; paternity leave

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Persson, Petra ; Rossin-Slater, Maya
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
• (where): Bonn
• (when): 2019

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/202732
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET