Abstract

We introduce childcare sharing in a collective model of household behavior to investigate
which factors make spouses increase or decrease their share of parental leave. The concern
about future consumption motivates parents to invest in their human capital and to
limit their leave duration. Using relative income and the age dierence between spouses
as distribution factors, we cannot reject Pareto eciency in childcare sharing. Higher
relative incomes and larger age dierences shift the conditional leave allocation towards
the relatively poorer and younger partner, respectively. Households with higher total
income purchase more professional childcare.

-reprinted from Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales de l'Universite catholique de Louvain