Parents’ reducing working hours: employment decisions after childbirth in Spain

Irene Lapuerta, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Parents are entitled to working time reduction to take care of children under-3 according to Spanish Labour Law. How many do really take advantage of this family policy? The aim of this paper is to analyse the transition from occupation to working time reduction after childbirth controlling for the fact that some parents may leave occupation (i.e. unemployment or inactivity) or remain with the same working schedule. Recent longitudinal micro-data allow us to investigate parents’ employment decisions after childbirth in a prospective manner. The research is based in a subsample of 44,719 individuals (parents who had a child between January of 2005 and June of 2007) from the Spanish Workers’ Social Security Files. I use an event history approach with a competing risk model whereby a person can make a transition to three different destinations: employment with time reduction; employment without time reduction or withdrawal from paid work.