Paula Eugenia Gobbi

Childcare and Commitment within Households

Parental time with children increases with the education of both the mother and the father. As the education of parents increases, the gap between childcare supplied by mothers relative to that supplied by fathers decreases. A two steps semi-cooperative marital decision model is proposed to explain these two facts. First, parents collectively choose the amount of labor to supply and, in a second step, each of them chooses the amount of childcare as the outcome of a Cournot game. This framework gives rise to indeterminacy of the equilibrium and four selection criteria are proposed: one of a machist society, one of a feminist society, one of a random equilibrium and a last one that estimates the degree of social gender bias towards men. The semi-cooperative theoretical frameworks with the random selection criterion and the criterion that estimates the bias towards men provide the best match with the data.

Intra-Household Allocation of Parental Leave

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 difference between spouses as distribution factors, we cannot reject Pareto efficiency in childcare sharing. Higher relative incomes and larger age differences shift the conditional leave allocation towards the relatively poorer and younger partner, respectively. Households with higher total income purchase more professional childcare.