Research project Exploring male fertility and parental leave at the extensive margin

Previous studies have suggested that male childlessness has a strong income gradient. Among low-income men born in 1932 only 28 per cent were childless at the age of 45, while among those born in 1967 the corresponding figure is 41 per cent. For high-income men in those cohorts, childlessness has increased, but only marginally. Similarly, it is prevalently men with low education and low earnings that have no parental leave uptake. 

In the first part of the project we analyze the causal mechanism behind the increase in male childlessness, and thereby how the selection into fatherhood has escalated in Sweden. We exploit differences in childlessness between brothers and male twins to analyze the selection into fatherhood. The second part of the project focuses on men who have become fathers, but have not used any parental leave benefits. We begin by characterizing these fathers in terms of socio-demographic and health features, to then proceed to analyzing the causal relations exploiting both brother- and sibling-differences to investigate the selection of fathers who do not take any parental leave.