Norway's Fathers' Quota (1993) — Evidence on a Reserved Paternity-Leave Period

On 1 April 1993 Norway introduced a paternal quota: a reserved share of parental leave available only to fathers and lost if unused. Finland, Iceland and Sweden later reserved shares for fathers too. Because the reform created a sharp cut-off in eligibility, economists have used it to estimate causal effects.
Cools, Fiva and Kirkebøen (CESifo Working Paper 3513, 2011) use Norwegian register data and find that school performance at age 16 increases for children whose father is relatively higher educated than the mother. They find no evidence that fathers' earnings and work hours are affected, and, contrary to expectation, that mothers' labour-market outcomes are adversely affected. They conclude that the findings do not suggest paternity leave shifts the gender balance at home in a way that raises mothers' market work.
Rege and Solli (Demography, 2013), also exploiting the 1993 reform, find that four weeks of paternity leave decrease fathers' future earnings by 2.1 percent, which the authors read as consistent with greater long-term father involvement in home production.
The practice is therefore evidenced and widely transferred, but its benefit for gender equality in the labour market is mixed; the two studies disagree on fathers' earnings and neither finds improved outcomes for mothers.

Read the full analysis: https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp3513.pdf