Self-employment and parental leave

• The main objective of this paper is to analyse the extent to which employment status impacts upon the use of parental leave in Sweden. Our results show that during the child’s first two years of life Swedish female self-employees use on average 46 fewer days in parental leave (15 percent) than female wage earners, while male self-employees use on average 27 fewer days in parental leave (71 percent) than their wage earner counterparts.  We argue that the shorter average duration of parental leave among male self-employees is due to a combination of relatively higher costs of absence from work for self-employees compared to wage earners and a participation selection effect where some individuals with high performance-related income opt for self-employment and do not take parental leave at all, and where the self-employed who actually choose to take parental leave are similar to wage earners in terms of work-commitments and consequently reduces the difference in duration between self-employed and wage earners. On the other hand, given that all mothers, self-employees or wage earners, take parental leave, we do not find a participation effect among female self-employees. Instead, we suspect that there is an employment selection effect where women with high performance related income choose self-employment and consequently contributes to the shorter observed durations of parental leave for female self-employees.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Parental leave

employment status

gender equality

Sweden

self-employment

Economy

Ekonomi

Economics

Nationalekonomi

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)