Eliciting and Shaping Beliefs About Shared Parental Leave
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Presented by: Sonkurt Sen
Despite the growing availability of paternity leave policies across the world, most fathers do not take any leave at all or only a small proportion of what they are eligible for. This could be driven by families only marginally valuing the time that fathers spend with their newborn children. Using a novel survey on a nationally representative sample of child-bearing individuals in the UK, we elicit beliefs about the Shared Parental Leave (SPL) policy. We show that individuals importantly and positively value an additional week of leave taken by the father, instead of the mother, on a range of outcomes pertaining to the well-being of the mother, the father, and the child. We further show that gender attitudes importantly predicts returns of SPL across most outcomes analyzed, and that a simple information experiments results in individuals positively updating their beliefs of returns to paternal leave.