Working Papers

  • Can Paternity Leave Reduce the Gender Earnings Gap? (with Yaya Diallo and Fabian Lange)

    • Revise and resubmit, Journal of Labor Economics
    Show abstract

    This paper examines the impact of paternity leave uptake on the gender gap in labor market outcomes. Utilizing administrative data from Canadian tax records, we analyze Quebec’s 2006 parental leave reform, which introduced five weeks of paid leave exclusively to fathers and significantly increased fathers’ uptake of parental leave. 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 reduced fathers’ earnings immediately after birth. 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 birth 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 differentially affected care-taking and family responsibilities in the treated population.

  • Delivering Student Grants Through College Savings Accounts (with William Arbour and Fernando Saltiel)

    • Draft coming soon!
    Show abstract

    We provide the first large-scale evidence on the effects of delivering postsecondary education grants through college savings accounts on account opening, parental saving behavior, and college enrollment. Specifically, we study the Canada Learning Bond (CLB), a federal program that deposits up to $2,000 into registered college savings accounts for children from low-income families, with funds accessible only upon college enrollment. We identify the effects of CLB eligibility using administrative microdata from British Columbia and a difference-in-discontinuities design around the date-of-birth eligibility cutoff. We find three key results. First, CLB eligibility increases college savings account ownership by 7 percentage points and, despite requiring no parental contributions, 72% of parents induced to open accounts voluntarily choose to contribute their own funds. Second, these behavioral effects extend beyond eligible children: parents also open accounts and increase saving for older, ineligible siblings. Third, CLB eligibility raises bachelor’s degree enrollment by 4.6 percentage points for eligible children and 2.4 percentage points for older siblings. This sibling spillover, which occurs absent any direct grant to these older children, provides clean causal evidence that induced parental saving itself expands college access, not the direct transfer alone. Our findings demonstrate that the design of financial aid matters: delivering grants through college savings accounts generates behavioral responses that amplify program impacts beyond the transfer itself.

Publications