We investigate the medium term effect of parenthood on both maternal and paternal health by combining Dutch administrative data on healthcare utilization and survey data on self-reported health. We exploit a stacked difference-in-differences design that accounts for the heterogeneity of the effect by age at first birth and reduces estimation bias from the non-random timing of fertility. Our findings document a persistent deterioration in both maternal and paternal health, with larger increases in medical treatments associated with medium- to high-severity respiratory, neurological, and cardiovascular conditions. These adverse effects are concentrated among parents with low socioeconomic status, and consistent with this pattern, stratifying the analysis at the age at first birth level reveals larger effects among younger first-time parents. This age-gradient persists even after conditioning on pre-parenthood socioeconomic and health levels, suggesting that selection into early fertility can only partly explain these larger effects among younger parent cohorts. Finally, we find no evidence that access to either formal or informal caregiving support attenuates the adverse health effects of parenthood for mothers, whereas daycare availability and grandparents’ proximity act as protective factors for fathers’ outpatient costs and drug prescription rate.

We study the effect of sickness leave duration on long-term labor market outcomes for temporary workers in the Netherlands. Using administrative population-wide data on temporary workers who called in sick between 2010 and 2015, we first run a descriptive event studies matching sick workers to observationally equivalent controls. The results indicate that even short sickness spells persistently reduce employment, with larger declines for longer durations, and conditional employment losses in wages, hours, and permanent contract probability. Because sickness leave spells' duration is mechanically correlated with underlying health, these estimates cannot be interpreted as causal. To isolate causal effects, we exploit a 2013 reform introducing a health assessment after 12 months of sickness leave, which substantially shortened sickness spells. Implementing an augmented regression discontinuity in time design, we find that shorter spells increase employment by about 5 percentage points for up to nine years, accompanied by reduced reliance on sickness and disability benefits. Conditional on employment, no significant effects emerge on wages, hours, contract type, or sectoral mobility.