Abstract

Parental leave is one of the most important policies that shape the post-birth careers of women.We exploit a sequence of parental leave reforms in Germany that extended both the job protection period and the duration of parental leave benefits to different extents to study the effects of the two policy instruments parental leave consists of. Using administrative social security data, we first replicate the stylized facts that mothers respond to extensions in parental leave and that the average effect of longer leavetaking on their careers is negative. In a second step, we analyze the causal effects of job protection and parental benefit payments.