This paper examines the health effects of parenthood in the five years after first childbirth for both mothers and fathers. We link Dutch administrative data on healthcare utilization with survey data on self-reported health to estimate stacked event study models that adjust for the non-random timing of fertility and heterogeneity by age at first birth. We find that parenthood leads to a persistent deterioration in physical health for both mothers and fathers, reflected in higher inpatient and outpatient costs and increased treatments for respiratory, cardiovascular, and neurological conditions. These adverse effects are concentrated among individuals with lower socioeconomic status and are substantially larger among younger first-time parents, even after conditioning on pre-parenthood health and socioeconomic characteristics. Access to (in)formal childcare mitigates little of these effects for mothers, while modestly protecting fathers. We find a persistent “health penalty” of parenthood that amplifies existing health inequalities and highlights the importance of considering parental health in family and social policy design.

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.