When Dad Can Stay Home: Fathers' Workplace Flexibility and Maternal Health, Maya Rossin-Slater, PhD, Department of Health Research and Policy, Stanford University School of Medicine
Thursday, September 19, 2019, 3:00 pm to 4:30 pm., Gross Hall 270
Note: This DUPRI seminar starts 30 minutes earlier this week at 3 p.m.
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. Maya Rossin-Slater 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. Rossin-Slater models 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. Her research finds that increasing the father's temporal flexibility reduces the risk of the mother experiencing physical postpartum health complications and improves her mental health. The 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.