"Can Parental Leave Policies Change Leave-Taking Norms ? Evidence from Immigrants (coauthored with Samantha Trajkowvski and Nikolaos Theodoropoulos)"

Abstract :
When a public policy makes it less costly to take longer maternity leaves, leave lengths increase as a direct consequence of the lower costs. In addition, if enough people take leave, leave-taking may increase further as norms adjust. This paper provides evidence of these indirect impacts by considering how leave-taking by foreign-born mothers in the U.S. respond to maternity leave policies in their home countries. Because immigrants in the U.S. are not directly exposed to home country policies but do bring with them norms, the impacts of additional weeks of paid leave in home countries on leave-taking behaviors of immigrants can be viewed as evidence of a role played by norms. Exploiting variation in the timing of childbirth in conjunction with the timing of changes in home country leave policies, we show that even in models controlling for country-of-origin fixed effects, changes in home country policies yield changes in leave-taking among immigrants in the United States.