Is there too much parental leave?

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Decades ago, I could have been fired because of my pregnancy or my salary dropped to zero after giving birth. These days I receive job protection (mainly through the FT), a generous amount of maternity leave on full pay and even a coach to help me return to work. In general, I support policies that support those of us who produce future taxpayers. But can you go too far?

The purpose of parental leave was initially to protect the health of mother and child. Birth requires some recovery time, and although communication isn’t my toddler’s strong suit, I think he also appreciated the peace and quiet at home. More recently, expanded parental benefits have been seen as a way to promote gender equality or even increase birth rates. By forcing men to wear more diapers, paternity leave could offset the burden of raising children.

Unfortunately, the unintended consequences are easy to imagine. Extended maternity leave could discourage mothers from paid work. Generous benefits could make managers reluctant to hire potential parents. Familiarizing more fathers with the realities of full-time child care might even deter some of them from pursuing the profession.

Helpfully, governments have presented numerous reforms for economists to evaluate. And at least some parental leave has many positive effects, from health benefits for mother and child to greater involvement of fathers in family life.

But at least when it comes to maternity leave, the economic benefits appear to be limited. A review found that while leave of up to about six months improves mothers’ chances of returning to paid work, leave of more than about a year has the opposite effect. When the French and German governments expanded the scheme beyond this in the 1980s and 1990s, mothers’ paid employment and wages suffered.

There is also some unpleasant evidence that the benefits backfire, at least in part. A working paper by Jenna Stearns of the University of California, Davis found that in the UK, extending employment protection to one year reduced the chances of getting a promotion or a management position. Another study found that in Germany, more generous maternity benefits led small companies to hire fewer women of childbearing age for jobs that were difficult to fill.

Paternity leave isn’t any easier. For example, a new working paper finds that men who work longer hours are penalized when applying for jobs in male-dominated industries. Another study found that in Norway, making paternity leave more generous reduced men’s earnings by 1-3 percent. They argued that this was due to a “rate race” where a father taking time off opened up room for colleagues to move forward. (The author’s fix is ​​for all fathers to use their allotted vacation.)

Other alarming studies include an examination of a Swedish reform that provided fathers with a month of paid parental leave and found that it increased the likelihood of divorce by about one percentage point. Admittedly, a later reform that increased paternity leave without reducing the amount available to mothers had no such effect.

The first finding may be because mothers responded by taking more unpaid leave, which increased the financial strain on the relationship. (Other research has also found that paternity leave can reduce the likelihood of parental separation.)

The impact of extended paternity leave on fertility is also somewhat complicated. A study of a Spanish reform found that just two weeks of paternity leave increased the time between births, while researchers in Belgium found a similar effect among younger mothers. The authors of the Spanish study suggest that two mechanisms are at play: men becoming aware of the reality of full-time care of a newborn; and women enjoy better career prospects, which hinders further reproduction.

Of course, the existence of unintended consequences does not justify the very stingy national policies on which many Americans and Britons have to rely.

Shamefully, America has no federal floor on parental allowance, while in Britain the minimum is 90 percent of wages for six weeks and then a maximum of £184 a week for 33 more weeks. My memories of the time after my son was born are hazy, but I think I spent about that much on diapers and wipes alone. As this is my last column before I go on maternity leave for the second time, I welcome the opportunity for a refresher – and am grateful that the FT policy is more generous.

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