Time allocations to the labor market are often understood through opportunity costs: the higher the value of an individual’s time in the labor force, the more that individual has to lose by spending time in other activities, such as taking care of a child. Literature on child care in general and parental leave in particular however poses two important puzzles to the opportunity cost premise. First, a higher education of the father, one of the most important predictors of labor market value, is across contexts and time connected with a larger investment in child care as well as parental leave. Second, a higher income of the father, one of the most important outcomes of labor market value, is also positively related to parental leave taking.

In this study, we explore occupational conditions of work as a possible explanation to why highly educated, high earning fathers are better able to take leave from work to care for their children. We investigate a number of work conditions that are associated with income levels: facilitating aspects such as job autonomy, capabilities to negotiate leave-taking and job security but also hindering aspects such as career costs and a demanding job. We study Sweden as one of the few contexts in the world in which fathers’ time allocations respond to the birth of a child. The number of parental leave weeks taken by the father and the mother in the first two years of the child’s life is analyzed using administrative register data for 29,559 parental couples having their first child in 2009. Detailed information on occupations of both mothers and fathers allow for the use of multi-level multi-membership models with each couple nested in 112 father and 111 mother occupations. Conditions of work are added as occupational-level predictors.