Time: 13 december 2017, 1 - 2 pm
Place: B705

Abstract

This study investigates how parents who separate use and share parental leave compared to parents who do not separate during the child’s first 8 years. The Swedish parental leave system encourages a division of care and economic responsibility for new-born children. The leave is individual with 8 months to each parent and one parent has to sign over days to the other in cases of unequal sharing; something that is often done from the father to the mother who still uses most leave. To what extent do separated fathers use the parental leave? Parental leave could up until 2014 be used until the child turns 8 and as family dissolution is relatively common in Sweden, a large share of parents has parental leave days left when they separate. We use various descriptive and analytical approaches to compare the parental leave use among parents depending on timing of separation. Our results indicate that both separated fathers and mothers use less parental leave after the separation. Before separation, there is no clear pattern of significant differences between fathers who separate and those who don’t, but mothers who later separate use more leave before separation. We interpret the finding to indicate that there is still need to encourage a shared responsibility of childcare in Sweden, especially after a separation of parents.