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  • P-ISSN 1738-656X
  • E-ISSN 2586-4130
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한국개발연구. Vol. 34, No. 1, March 2012, pp. 172-197

https://doi.org/10.23895/kdijep.2012.34.1.169

× KDI Open Access is a program of fully open access journals to facilitate the widest possible dissemination of high-quality research. All research articles published in KDI JEP are immediately, permanently and freely available online for everyone to read, download and share in terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Parental Leave and Female Labor Supply in Korea

Jung ho Kim

Author & Article History

Manuscript received 27 June 2010; revision received 18 October 2010; accepted 03 February 2012.

Abstract

It is often argued that the parental leave should be extended in order to help employees achieve the balance of work and family life. However, one should be careful in designing the parental leave since there is a tradeoff between the continuity of employment after childbearing and the depreciation of human capital due to the time off the work. The paper investigates whether the parental leave payment introduced in Korea in 2001 helped women's take-up of the leave and employment after giving birth. The results are as follows. First, the increase in the payment indeed raised the female take-up of the leave. Second, women returned to labor market less often after giving birth in the short run, but the size of the effect tends to decrease in the long run. However, the negative effect on returning to the same workplace after the birth remains significant in the long run. Lastly, there is no evidence that the share of women of childbearing age at workplace changed due to the increase in the parental leave payment. Although there is a limitation in that the analysis is based only on the employment covered by the Employment Insurance, these findings imply that the increase in the parental leave payment may not be an effective policy tool for promoting female labor market participation. On the other hand, it should be noted that it is necessary to pay attention to child development as well as female employment as an objective in order to make an overall judgement on the parental leave policy.

Keywords

육아휴직(Parental Leave), 여성 노동공급(Female Labor Supply)

JEL Code

J22, J32

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