ESRI Policy Seminar: "The Impact of Paid Parental Leave on Labour Supply and Employment Outcomes"

Speaker: Duncan McVicar, Professor of Economics, Queen’s University Belfast

Venue : ESRI, Whitaker Square, Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, Dublin 2

The introduction of the Australian Paid Parental Leave scheme in 2011 provides a rare opportunity to estimate the labour supply and employment impacts of publicly-funded paid leave on mothers in the first year post-partum. The almost universal coverage of the scheme coupled with detailed survey data collected specifically for this purpose means that eligibility for paid leave under the scheme can be plausibly taken as exogenous following a standard propensity score matching exercise. In line with much of the existing literature, we find a positive impact on leave taking in the first half year and on the probability of eventually returning to work in the first year. The paper provides new evidence of a positive impact on continuing in the same job and under the same conditions. Further new evidence shows that disadvantaged mothers – low income, less educated, without access to employer-funded leave – respond most to the scheme.

Note: The discussion paper is available to download here.

Duncan McVicar

Duncan McVicar is Professor of Economics at Queen's University Belfast, having previously worked at the University of Melbourne and the Northern Ireland Economic Research Centre. His research interests include: program evaluation and welfare reform; disability, unemployment and inactivity; education, peer effects and substance use; and sequence analysis of labour market data. He has published widely in economics and social science, including in Applied Economics, Applied Economics Letters, Australian Economic Review, Contemporary Social Science, Economica, Economic & Social Review, Fiscal Studies, Industrial Relations, IZA Journal of Labor Policy, Journal of Economic Surveys, Journal of Health Economics, Journal of Mathematical Sociology, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society A, Labour Economics, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics; Oxford Economic Papers, Regional Studies, Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Social Science & Medicine, and Sociological Methods & Research. He is currently working on peer effects in education, VET reform, the links between homelessness and substance use, and disability benefits, among other things.