Why are not all Swedish fathers taking parental leave?

The purpose of this project is to examine which fathers take only few days of paid parental leave and to what extent this can be related to physical, economic, or normative constraints. Moreover, we analyze how the first two months of reserved parental leave benefits affected the composition of fathers with a low uptake of paid parental leave.

To study causal relationships, we estimate a so-called difference-in-discontinuity design. Finally, we use quasi-experimental variation in sibling composition to more closely examine the role of gender norms.

In this study, we focus on fathers who are employed, born in Sweden, and living with their child. That is, we focus on a group of fathers with good prerequisites for staying home with their child, yet where one-third still refrain from using their reserved days of paid parental leave.

Using register data, we study fathers of children born between 1995 and 2015. We define low uptake of parental leave benefits as using at most half of the reserved days. In line with previous studies on Swedish parental leave, we focus on parental leave benefits during the child’s first two years.