Why don’t married men take parental leave?

Despite its availability, only a few married men use parental leave in Canada while almost all eligible married women take parental leave. As possible explanations, I consider gender differences in rental rates of human capital, wage growth processes, wage penalties for time off from work, preferences for leisure, and relative productivity in home production. I briefly document empirical background about Canadian parental leave policy and supporting evidence for the possible explanations. To quantify the relative importance of these explanations, I develop a life-cycle model of family labour supply that features learning-by-doing human capital accumulation and time allocations across market work, leisure, and home production. The model is calibrated using Canadian data. Calibrated parameters imply that compared to mothers, fathers have lower home productivity in the presence of an infant, higher rental rates of human capital, and higher wage penalties for not working. I find that the gender differences in home productivity, rental rates of human capital, and wage penalties for not working are three major contributors to the low take-up of fathers. Among high-educated people, the three explanations account for 36%, 15%, and 13% of the gender gap in the take-up rates of parental leave, respectively. Eliminating these three factors explains all the gender gap in the take-up rates among high-educated parents. I also find that a combination of introducing paternity leave and offering higher replacement rates during maternity and paternity leaves increases fathers take-up rates for parental leave with a small increase in aggregate spending. ∗I am very grateful to Audra Bowlus and Betsy Caucutt for invaluable guidance and support. I also thank Jacob Short for helpful comments. Facilities provided at the Statistic Canada Research Data Centre at the University of Western Ontario and Computational resources from the Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network (SHARCNET) are also greatly appreciated. All errors are my own. E-mail: [email protected]. †The latest version is available at https://sites.google.com/view/youjinchoi.