The RFBerlin Brown Bag Seminar is an informal lunchtime meet up where researchers, students, and practitioners present ongoing work and new ideas in a relaxed, discussion-oriented setting. Rooted in the tradition of bringing one’s own lunch in a paper-brown bag, it offers space for open exchange and constructive feedback.
This week, we welcome Federica Meluzzi, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Economics at Bocconi University and Research Affiliate at RFBerlin. In June 2026, Federica will join LMU Munich as Assistant Professor in Economics.
Her research focuses on labor, gender, and public economics, studying how peers, firms, and public policies shape gender norms, as well as how education policies and pay transparency affect equal opportunities and wage inequality. Federica Meluzzi received the Young Economist Prize from the European Association of Labor Economists in 2024 and from the Italian Association of Labor Economists in 2025
Event Topic:
Who Cares? Parental Leave Benefits and Household Division of Childcare
joint with Pia Molitor and Jakob Wegmann
Low take-up of parental leave by fathers is a key driver of the unequal career costs of parenthood for men and women. Can the design of public policies effectively increase fathers’ participation in parental leave? This paper provides the first causal evidence on how financial incentives shape the intra-household allocation of childcare. We exploit exogenous variation in parental leave benefits induced by a sharp kink in the benefit schedule relative to individual pre-birth net income, combined with novel German administrative data covering millions of households between 2014 and 2018. Using a double Regression Kink Design—an extension of the RKD methodology by Card et al. (2015)—we estimate the behavioral responses of both mothers and fathers to changes in their own and their partner’s replacement rates. We find that a reduction in the mother’s benefit leads to a substitution in parental inputs, decreasing her leave duration while increasing the father’s take-up, especially along the intensive margin, without altering the total duration of parental leave taken by the household. However, responses are quantitatively modest, reflecting persistent traditional gender roles, and are stronger when fathers face lower opportunity costs and in more egalitarian regions. Our findings highlight how financial incentives interact with cultural and economic constraints to shape household decisions, with implications for the design of family policies aimed at fostering gender equality.
Event Details:
Participation in the seminar is limited to RFBerlin members and researchers from affiliated institutions. External researchers who are interested in attending are kindly asked to contact us at [email protected]
