Economics Research Seminar Series: Jessica Pan, National University of Singapore

Jessica Pan, National University of Singapore

Topic

Understanding the Barriers to Paternity Leave-Taking: Evidence from Japan (joint with Marianne Bertrand, Patricia Cortes, Hitoshi Shigeoka, and Masayuki Yagasaki)

abstract

We study the barriers to paternity-leave taking in Japan, a country with one of the most generous parental leave policies for working parents, but very low rates of paternity leave take-up. Our focus is on the role of male employee beliefs about prevailing norms surrounding paternity leave-taking, employer support for leave-taking, and perceptions of the career impacts of taking paternity leave, which we elicit using representative surveys of individuals and managers. We document that the vast majority of Japanese male employees are supportive of (and keen to take) at least 2 weeks or 1 month of paternity leave, yet substantially underestimate how supportive their managers and co-workers are toward new fathers taking paternity leave of the same duration. Further, they overestimate the extent to which managers’ perceive that taking paternity leave would result in negative career impacts. We conduct a pilot information experiment among married male employees and provide suggestive evidence that correcting misperceptions about the extent of support among middle managers leads to a shift in attitudes and beliefs, but only among those who could accurately recall the information. A major challenge that we plan to tackle in follow-up work is how to correct these misperceptions in a credible, meaningful, and scalable way.