Linking Dutch administrative data on healthcare utilization and survey data on self-reported health, we provide evidence of a persistent deterioration in both maternal and paternal health over the first five years following first childbirth. We propose a novel stacked difference-in-differences model that combines two pre-existing stacked approaches to deal with the non‐random timing of fertility and  heterogeneity in the effect by age at first birth. The adverse health effect is driven by higher healthcare costs associated with medium- to high-severity conditions, and is more pronounced among younger first-time parents, who are on average from lower socio-economic backgrounds. We rule out that exposure to either formal or informal childcare support mitigates the effect, leaving open the question of whether, and to what extent, policy reforms can address this societal issue.

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.