This paper examines the impact of paternity leave on the gender gap in labor market outcomes. Utilizing administrative data from Canadian tax records, we analyze the introduction of Quebec's 2006 paternity leave policy, which offers five weeks of paid leave exclusively to fathers. Using mothers and fathers of children born around the reform, we estimate how the policy impacted labor market outcomes up to 10 years following birth. The reform significantly increased fathers' uptake of parental leave and reduced their earnings immediately after the reform. However, in the medium to long-run, we find that the reform did not impact earnings, employment, or the probability of being employed in a high-wage industry for either parent. We for instance find a 95%-CI for the effect on average female earnings 3-10 years following the reform ranging from -2.2 to +1.7%. Estimates of effects on other outcomes and for males are similarly precise zeros. There is likewise no evidence that the reform changed social norms around care-taking and family responsibilities.
In the paper, we collaborate with several Senegalese governmental agencies to build the first longitudinal employer-employee dataset in a Sub-Saharan African country. The resulting linked employer-employee dataset in Senegal covers approximately 10% of total employment and presents an opportunity to extend the existing research on wage-setting in low-income countries. Our findings indicate that the share of wages explained by firms in Senegal is greater than what is typically observed in the literature, as reviewed by Card et al. (2018).
The paper provides evidence of the impact of children on parents' labor market outcomes in Canada, commonly referred to as 'child penalties.' Using rich administrative data, I estimate child penalties across Canadian provinces. I leverage variations introduced by the 2006 Quebec reform to examine the impact of a generous parental leave policy on men's and women's earnings and participation.
This paper reviews the state of the art in firm-level Total Factor Productivity (TFP) estimation by employing an unbalanced panel of 4,501 Senegalese firms in the Construction and Trade Services industries over the period 2008–2018. The three semi-parametric models considered: Olley and Pakes (1996) -OP, Levisohn and Petrin (2003)’s LP, and Ackerberg et al. (2015) -ACF. Our findings are summarized as: (i) the ACF produces insignificant capital and labor coefficients for both Construction and trade services industries, while LP produces the best alternative within semi-parametric models and it is better than OP; (ii) tax pressure adversely affects TFP and the adverse effect is found to be severe in the groups of trades services firms, suggesting that the distortive nature of corporate tax affects disproportionately firms across the sectors. The results also suggest that the local economic environment plays a role on firm performance in the trade industry.
The paper examines the role of social interaction in governmental program participation, specifically focusing on the 2006 Quebec Parental Insurance Plan (QPIP). It investigates whether a father’s decision to take parental leave is influenced by the choices made by his co-workers regarding paternity leave. We use the Canadian-matched employer-employee datasets to identify new fathers and their co-workers. The findings reveal that fathers are more inclined to take paternity leave when their male colleagues also opt for parental leave.
As a TA, I use R to help students in manipulating real data, estimating, and testing various labor economics theories, such as the elasticity of labor supply and demand, returns to schooling, the gender wage gap, and investment in human capital.
Introduction to stata using real data to estimate and test economics models.
