Parental leave laws can support new parents in two complementary ways: by offering jobprotected leave and by offering financial support during that leave. This study assesses the design of parental leave policies operating in 21 high-income countries. Specifically, the study analyzes how these countries vary with respect to the generosity of their parental leave policies; the extent to which their policy designs are gender egalitarian; and the ways in which these two crucial dimensions are inter-related. The study finds that public policies in all 21 study countries protect at least one parent's job for a period of weeks, months, or years following the birth or adoption of a child. The availability and generosity of wage replacement varies widely, as does the gendered nature of policy designs. Four countries stand out as having policies that are both generous and gender egalitarian: Finland, Norway, Sweden and -unexpectedly -Greece.

Chapter 3 takes up the question of the robustness of the cross-country evidence for the orthodox claim that labor market institutions explain the pattern of unemployment across the affluent countries. A detailed survey of the most influential cross-country statistical studies finds a wide range of results that are highly sensitive to the nature of the variables, the time period, and the econometric method employed. Simple scatter plots of unemployment against six standard measures of labor market institutions for five-year periods between 1980 and 1999 show no significant relationships. In their multivariate tests, which follow standard approaches, the authors find weak and even perverse effects of the standard institutional variables. They conclude that “the empirical case has not been made that could justify the sweeping and unconditional prescriptions for labor market deregulation which pervade much of the policy discussion.”

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National paid sick day and paid sick leave policies are compared in 22 countries ranked highly in terms of economic and human development. The authors calculate the financial support available to workers facing two different kinds of health problems: a case of the flu that requires missing 5 days of work, and a cancer treatment that requires 50 days of absence. Only 3 countries--the United States, Canada, and Japan--have no national policy requiring employers to provide paid sick days for workers who need to miss 5 days of work to recover from the flu. Eleven countries guarantee workers earning the national median wage full pay for all 5 days. In Ireland and the United Kingdom, the full-time equivalent benefits are more generous for low-wage workers than for workers earning the national median. The United States is the only country that does not provide paid sick leave for a worker undergoing a 50-day cancer treatment. Luxembourg and Norway provide 50 full-time equivalent working days of leave, while New Zealand provides the least, at 5 days. In 6 countries, paid sick leave benefits are more generous for low-wage workers than for median-wage workers.