Asia-Kim Francavilla: When Coworkers Extend Leave: Effects on Mothers' Earnings Trajectories
Asia-Kim Francavilla: When Coworkers Extend Leave: Effects on Mothers' Earnings Trajectories
Last winter I received a Graduate Student Grant from The Europe Center at Stanford. This support was essential for a summer research stay in Nuremberg, Germany, to work on secure German employer-employee data at the Research Data Center (FDZ) of the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). The stay allowed me to move my dissertation project from a proposal to a set of concrete empirical results on how coworkers' parental leave choices shape mothers' careers inside firms.
The project studies whether the peer maternity leave environment at the time of childbirth affects a focal mother's career. The idea is simple. Promotion ladders are relative. Within teams, peers of similar age, occupation, and education compete for visibility and recognition. When several coworkers have children in close succession, differences in leave duration change who is present when tasks are assigned and performance is observed. If visibility matters, a mother could benefit when more coworkers are absent, even if her own leave does not change.
Germany offers a clean policy setting. On January 1, 2007, the country replaced a means-tested benefit with an earnings-related parental allowance. The reform induced medium-and high-earning mothers to extend leave, creating sharp variation in the share of coworkers with long leaves across otherwise similar teams. This policy change is the basis for my identification strategy.
The data I use is highly sensitive and can only be used in a secure facility run by Germany's Institute for Employment Research (IAB). The Europe Center grant covered travel and local transport so I could work on-site with the data. While there, I built a sample of mothers who had a child around the 2007 policy change and who had at least one coworker who also became a parent around the same time. For each of these mothers, I measured the "peer leave environment," defined as how many of her comparable coworkers in the same workplace, role, and education group took long parental leaves. I then tracked what happened to these mothers' earnings and jobs for several years after childbirth.
Three takeaways stood out. Across the full sample, mothers earned more in the years after childbirth when coworker leave-taking was more symmetric- that is, when many peers also took extended parental leave. Gains are concentrated among mothers who themselves return earlier than their peers, or who are not eligible for the parental allowance. These findings are consistent with a visibility or relative-presence channel. More so, the effects are most pronounced in smaller establishments, where individual presence is more salient and short-term absences are harder to substitute.
This evidence suggests that the timing and distribution of coworkers' leave is a relevant aspect in determining mothers' post-birth earnings; this points to the importance of considering within firm responses and dynamics before drawing policy conclusions.
Working inside the secure data center with the German administrative data was essential. It let me define coworkers in a realistic way- by workplace, role and education- rather than using broad firm averages. It also allowed careful checks to ensure I was comparing similar groups and not confusing policy effects with pre-existing differences. Finally, being on site made it possible to iterate quickly: test alternative definitions of "team", try different time windows around childbirth, and run the most transparent before-and-after comparisons.
The Europe Center's grant funded the travel required to use Germany's secure data and gave me the time on site to build a high-quality dataset and run the first analyses. I'm grateful for the support. It helped transform an idea about workplace competition into evidence that can guide both scholarship and practical steps for more equitable career progression.