More father leave, more babies? Father-exclusive parental leave periods and fertility

Abstract

Using national birth records from Spain, we examine the effect of father-exclusive parental leave on fertility. To do so, we run a Bayesian structural time series analysis exploiting the 2-week leave introduction and extensions up to 8 weeks. This methodology allows us to construct a time counterfactual to track the policy effect over time. We find suggestive evidence that, overall, father-exclusive parental leave does not affect the fertility rate of women of childbearing age. But we identify a heterogeneous policy effect once we disentangle the effect by birth order. The birth count of first- and second-order births does not report a change over time with respect to any of the leave entitlements. In contrast, linked to the 4-week extension, higher-order births exhibit a positive effect consolidated over time. With the 4-week benefit implementation, third- and higher-order births increase, on average, by 0.8% and 1.1%. The analysis provides useful policy insights into how work-life reconciliation policies that call active fatherhood can promote fertility. JEL classification— J08, J13, D13, I12, H31