What's happening: While the U.S. is an outlier, other developed nations in Europe and Asia do offer extensive leave. Still, there's a gap between passing laws and actually getting people to take the time off.

• Often firms in the U.S. and elsewhere stress "putting the company above all else," says Kate Weisshaar, a professor at UNC, Chapel Hill. "The culture of a workplace can contribute to who feels like they're safe to take leave or take full leave."
• Just this week, Shinjiro Koizumi, a popular Japanese politician, made a splash when he decided to take paternity leave. New fathers get up to a year off in Japan, but only about 6% of eligible men working at private firms took it in 2018, per the New York Times.

In a recent study, Weisshaar tested employer perceptions of parental leave by sending three types of resumes and cover letters for open roles: people who currently held jobs, people who stated they were unemployed due to layoffs, and people who said they had chosen to stay home for a while to take care of children.

• The resumes of the stay-at-home parents performed more poorly than those of the unemployed applicants, she says. And fathers were less likely to receive callbacks than mothers. "That sends a pretty strong message that employers care about this."

The big picture: There's a strong economic case to be made for parental leave — and paternity leave specifically, Barrons' Matthew Klein writes.

• The wage gap between men and women is exacerbated by the fact that mothers are expected to take time away from work and care for new babies alone. We could chip away at that gap if men and women received the same amount of leave, Klein notes.
• And in a new working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists studied how parental leave in Denmark — which has one of the most generous policies at 52 weeks of paid time off — affected companies' bottom lines and found no economic impact. It's worth noting, though, that the researchers did not examine the cost of paid parental leave to the government.

The bottom line: "The culture of being family friendly is one of the amenities of a job," says Heather Royer, an economist at UC, Santa Barbara, and one of the authors of the NBER paper. "Having family leave and having people take it creates this feeling that the firm values like outside of work, and that can make people happier when they're working."

Go deeper: Corporate America is pressured to boost paid parental leave

This week, Jeff Bezos donned traditional garb and visited Delhi for a two-day event with Amazon India and local sellers. He announced a $1 billion investment toward digitizing small businesses in India and bringing 10 million of them online by 2025, per Quartz.

• Add that to the nearly $6 billion Amazon has already poured into India.

Background: As we've reported, Amazon has become a target for activists and regulators alike, and that turbulence followed Bezos to India. People gathered near where Bezos was speaking to protest the investment, saying Amazon's discounts will put smaller retailers out of business. At the same time, India's antitrust regulator has opened an investigation into the e-commerce behemoth.

Go deeper: Amazon hits a speed bump with India's new e-commerce rules

"There's no such thing as a fire season anymore," says Fernanda Santos, a former New York Times reporter and author of "The Fire Line." "There has to be a rethinking of the way we fight fires."

What's happening: Even with help from seasonal workers, student volunteers, inmates and more, the crews that fight wildfires are often understaffed, says Don Whittemore, former assistant chief of the Rocky Mountain fire department.

• And as the fires intensify, there are more and more job openings to fight them. Fire-related job searches are surging in Australia, per a Hiring Lab analysis — meaning there are people who are looking to join the firefighting forces.
• Still, firefighting is "more of a guild than a profession," says Stephen Pyne, a fire historian. It requires intensive trainings — and even apprenticeships — that soak up time and money.
• The scarcity of fire crews is also giving rise to private firefighting teams for hire for the wealthy, reports the New York Times.

What's next: In the face of bigger fires and labor shortages, firefighters are turning to technology to help. They now use 747s and air tankers, which help give firefighters a break, "but at the end of the day all fires need to stopped on the ground," says Whittemore.

• Experts say one new tool that would make a big difference is GPS locators for fighters (they currently use radios to communicate, but often run into dead zones while on the job). If commanders in control centers could track exactly where crew members are, they could keep them safer and get smarter about fighting fires.
• Crews have also gotten better at mapping the fires themselves and predicting their paths. That's been helpful for crews to plan how to attack the blazes
• And some researchers haven't given up on moonshot ideas. XPRIZE, a California company, has teamed up with the state to solicit proposals and award multimillion dollar grants to researchers who want to develop a system to detect and suppress a wildfire within five minutes, Whittemore tells Axios.

But fire equipment has hardly evolved because there isn't much that these new technologies and techniques can do in the face of extreme fire. "We won't win an arms race with fire," says Pyne.

• There's too much money going toward fighting the fires and not enough toward educating communities on how to prepare their families and their houses for the blazes, Santos says.
• According to Pyne, over half of all mega-fires are started by humans — and those can be prevented.

The bottom line: The stakes of complacency in firefighting and prevention can't be overstated, experts tell us. "Our combustion practices are adding up to create the fire equivalent of the ice age," Pyne says. "Australia may be the first continent to feel it at scale."

Go deeper: U.S. wildfires scorched 4.6 million acres of land in 2019