Paid Family Leave,Fathers’ Leave‐Taking,and Leave‐Sharing in Dual‐Earner Households

Using difference‐in‐difference and difference‐in‐difference‐in‐difference designs, we study California's Paid Family Leave (CA‐PFL) program, the first source of government‐provided paid parental leave available to fathers in the Unites States. Relative to the pre‐treatment mean, fathers of infants in California are 46 percent more likely to be on leave when CA‐PFL is available. In households where both parents work, we find suggestive evidence that CA‐PFL increases both father‐only leave‐taking (i.e., father on leave while mother is at work) and joint leave‐taking (i.e., both parents on leave at the same time). Effects are larger for fathers of first‐born children than for fathers of later‐born children.     

The Effects of Paid Family Leave in California on Labor Market Outcomes

Using data from the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY‐97), we examine the effects of California's paid family leave program (CA‐PFL) on mothers’ and fathers’ use of leave during the period surrounding child birth, and on the timing of mothers’ return to work, the probability of eventually returning to prechildbirth jobs, and subsequent labor market outcomes. We estimate multivariate difference‐in‐differences regression models that compare changes in the outcomes for new California parents before and after the enactment of CA‐PFL to those for corresponding parents in control states. Our results suggest that CA‐PFL raised leave use by almost five weeks for the average covered mother and two to three days for the corresponding father. Maternal leave‐taking appears to increase in the quarter before the birth and to extend through the two quarters after it. Paternal leave‐taking rises fairly quickly after the birth and is short‐lasting. Rights to paid leave are also associated with higher work and employment probabilities for mothers nine to 12 months after birth, probably because they increase job continuity among those with relatively weak labor force attachments. We also find positive effects of California's program on hours and weeks of work during their child's second year of life.     

Parental Leave Legislation and Women's Work: A Story of Unequal Opportunities

U.S. federal and state family leave legislation requires employers to provide job‐protected parental leave for new mothers covered under the legislation. In most cases the leave is unpaid, and rarely longer than 12 weeks in duration. This study evaluates disparities in parental leave eligibility, access, and usage across the family income distribution in the United States. It also describes the links between leave‐taking and women's labor market careers. The focus is especially on low‐income families, as their leave coverage and ability to afford taking unpaid leave is particularly poor. This study shows that the introduction of both state and federal legislation increased overall leave coverage, leave provision, and leave‐taking. For example, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) leads to an increased probability of leave‐taking by nearly 20 percentage points and increased average leave length by almost five weeks across all states. The new policies did not, however, reduce gaps between low‐ and high‐income families’ eligibility, leave‐taking, or leave length. In addition, the FMLA effects on leave‐taking were very similar across states with and without prior leave legislation, and the FMLA did not disproportionately increase leave‐taking for women who worked in firms and jobs covered by the new legislation, as these women were already relatively well covered by other parental leave arrangements.     

Minimum wages and the economic well‐being of single mothers

Using pooled cross‐sectional data from the 1992 to 2005 March Current Population Survey (CPS), this study examines the relationship between minimum wage increases and the economic well‐being of single mothers. Estimation results show that minimum wage increases were ineffective at reducing poverty among single mothers. Most working single mothers were not affected by minimum wage hikes because they already earned wages above state and federal minimum wages. And less‐educated single mothers who were affected did not see a rise in net income because of negative employment and hours effects. For this low‐skilled population, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage was associated with an 8.8 percent reduction in employment and an 11.8 percent reduction in annual hours worked. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Discouraging Disadvantaged Fathers’ Employment: An Unintended Consequence of Policies Designed to Support Families

Substantial declines in employment and earnings among disadvantaged men may be exacerbated by child support enforcement policies that are designed to help support families but may have the unintended consequence of discouraging fathers’ employment. Disentangling causal effects is challenging because high child support debt may be both a cause and a consequence of unemployment and low child support order compliance. We used childbirth costs charged in unmarried mothers’ Medicaid‐covered childbirths, from Wisconsin administrative records, as an exogenous source of variation to identify the impact of debt. We found that greater debt has a substantial negative effect on fathers’ formal employment and child support payments, and that this effect is mediated by fathers’ prebirth earnings histories.     

Deadbeats and turnips in child support reform

Child support reforms have focused almost exclusively on punitive measures, driven by the stereotypical image of a “deadbeat dad” who can afford to pay child support but refuses to do so. This image fits some noncustodial fathers, but ignores the diverse nature of this population. We show that lack of income is a significant barrier to child support payments for 16 to 33 percent of young noncustodial fathers, whom we call “turnips” after the common saying that “You can't get blood from a turnip.” Furthermore, the characteristics of turnips are similar to those of custodial mothers who are long-term welfare recipients—both are disproportionately composed of young, poorly educated, never-married minorities with little work experience. These findings suggest that a new approach to child support enforcement is needed, one that offers these fathers flexible child support orders that both reflect their current economic circumstances and provide employment and training assistance to enable them to meet their child support obligations in the future.     

Child Health in Elementary School Following California's Paid Family Leave Program

We evaluate changes in elementary school children health outcomes following the introduction of California's Paid Family Leave (PFL) program, which provided parents with paid time off following the birth of a child. Our health outcomes—overweight, ADHD, and hearing‐related problems—are characterized by diagnosis rates that only pick up during early elementary school. Moreover, our health outcomes have been found to be negatively linked with many potential implications of extended maternity leave—increased breastfeeding, prompt medical checkups at infancy, reduced prenatal stress, and reduced non‐parental care during infancy. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies (ECLS) within a difference‐in‐differences framework, our results suggest improvements in health outcomes among California elementary school children following PFL's introduction. Furthermore, the improvements are driven by children from less advantaged backgrounds, which is consistent with the notion that California's PFL had the greatest effect on leave‐taking duration after childbirth mostly for less advantaged mothers who previously could not afford to take unpaid leave.     

The Effects of California's Paid Family Leave Program on Mothers’ Leave‐Taking and Subsequent Labor Market Outcomes

This analysis uses March Current Population Survey data from 1999 to 2010 and a differences‐in‐differences approach to examine how California's first in the nation paid family leave (PFL) program affected leave‐taking by mothers following childbirth, as well as subsequent labor market outcomes. We obtain robust evidence that the California program doubled the overall use of maternity leave, increasing it from an average of three to six weeks for new mothers—with some evidence of particularly large growth for less advantaged groups. We also provide evidence that PFL increased the usual weekly work hours of employed mothers of 1‐ to 3‐year‐old children by 10 to 17 percent and that their wage incomes may have risen by a similar amount.     

The impact of the family and medical leave act

This article uses data from employer surveys and the March Current Population Survey to investigate the impact of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) on coverage, leave‐taking, employment, and earnings. The variation in state laws prior to the FMLA and the variation in coverage under the FMLA provides a “natural experiment” in which the effect of the law can be compared for treatment and con‐trol groups. Although the FMLA covers less than half of workers in the private sector (many of whom already had coverage pre‐FMLA), this article finds that leave cover‐age and usage did increase post‐FMLA. The other surprising finding is that this mandated benefit had no significant negative effects on women's employment or wages. ©1999 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Child protective intervention in the context of welfare reform: The effects of work and welfare on maltreatment reports

Recent changes in welfare policy have produced changes in parental work and welfare receipt. These factors are assessed in relation to investigated reports of child abuse and neglect using survey data on 1998 welfare recipients in nine Illinois counties, in conjunction with longitudinal administrative data on cash welfare benefits, employment, and child abuse and neglect reports. Trend analyses show that rates of child maltreatment reports among welfare recipients have risen since the passage of PRWORA in 1996. Findings from multivariate analyses indicate that parental employment has a protective effect on reports to child protection systems (CPS), that this effect is greatest when combined with welfare receipt, and that this effect becomes stronger over time. Those who receive welfare in the absence of employment face a significantly greater risk of CPS involvement, even compared with those who neither work nor receive welfare. © 2003 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Local Labor Demand and Program Participation Dynamics: Evidence from New York SNAP Administrative Records

This study estimates the effect of local labor demand on the likelihood that Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) beneficiaries are able to transition out of the program. Our data include SNAP administrative records from New York (2007 to 2012), linked at the person‐level to the 2010 Census, and linked at the county‐month‐level to industry‐specific labor market conditions. We find that local labor markets matter for the length of time spent on SNAP, but there is substantial heterogeneity in estimated effects across local industries. Using Bartik‐style instruments to isolate the effect of labor demand and controlling for the changing composition of entrants and program rules brought on by the Great Recession, we find that fluctuations in labor demand in industries with high shares of SNAP participants—especially food service and retail—change the likelihood of exiting the program. Notably, estimated industry effects vary across race and parental status, with black participants being most sensitive to changes in local labor market conditions and mothers benefiting less from growth in local labor demand than fathers and non‐parents. We confirm that our results are not driven by endogenous inter‐county mobility or New York City labor markets and are robust to multiple specifications.     

Parental Leave and Gender Equality: Lessons from the European Union

abstract This article describes the development of European Union parental leave policy and its impact on mothers'and fathers'access to parental leave in the individual nations that make up the union. Cross-national variations in parental leave policy are described and analyzed. Although the 15 countries belonging to the EU in 2002 are concerned about helping working parents reconcile employment and family responsibilities, so far, only one—Sweden—has begun to develop a parental leave policy likely to facilitate men's and women's sharing of responsibility for breadwinning and child care.     

Immigration Enforcement and Children's Living Arrangements

Tougher immigration enforcement was responsible for 1.8 million deportations between 2009 and 2013 alone—many of them were fathers of American children. We exploit the geographic and temporal variation in the escalation of interior immigration enforcement to assess its impact on the structure of families to which many of the deported fathers of U.S.‐born children belonged. We find that the average increase in immigration enforcement during the 2005 to 2015 period has raised by 19 percent the likelihood that Hispanic U.S.‐born children might live without their parents in households headed by naturalized relatives or friends unthreatened by deportation. Likewise, the same increase in immigration enforcement has raised by 20 percent these children's propensity to live with likely undocumented mothers who report their spouses as being absent—a reasonable finding given that most children with a likely undocumented father have undocumented mothers. Given the negative consequences of being raised by a single parent or without parents, plus the parallel increase in interior immigration enforcement, gaining a better understanding of the collateral damage of heightened enforcement on the families to which these children belong is well warranted.     

Child support enforcement policy and unmarried fathers' employment in the underground and regular economies

Some scholars have suggested that a negative consequence of strengthening child support enforcement is to encourage fathers to shift from regular sector to underground employment. We employ data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to investigate the relationship between the strength of child support enforcement (CSE) and levels of underground and regular sector employment among unmarried fathers. We find that, in general, living in a city with stricter CSE is associated with fewer hours of underground employment. We find little evidence that stronger enforcement is associated with employment or hours in the regular sector. © 2007 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Did California Paid Family Leave Impact Infant Health?

The effects of paid parental leave policies on infant health have yet to be established. In this paper we investigate these effects by exploiting the introduction of California Paid Family Leave (PFL), the first program in the U.S. that specifically provides working parents with paid time off for bonding with a newborn. We measure health using the full census of infant hospitalizations in California and a set of control states, and implement a differences‐in‐differences approach. Our results suggest a decline in infant admissions, which is concentrated among those causes that are potentially affected by closer childcare (and to a lesser extent breastfeeding). Other admissions that are unlikely to be affected by parental leave do not exhibit the same pattern.     

Family Leave Policies and Labor Market Segregation in Germany: Reinvention or Reform of the Male Breadwinner Model?1

abstract The historically dominant male breadwinner and female carer model in West Germany has resulted in comparably low female employment rates and a gender‐structured labor market. Since the 1970s, the decline of traditional patterns and sectors of male employment has been accompanied by the expansion of the female‐dominated service sector. Supplemented by women's higher educational attainment, a pluralism of household forms, and German unification, the result has been constant growth in female employment. With more working mothers, the question of combining work and family has provoked policy responses that, in West Germany, have mainly centered on family leave policies. In addressing the question of whether these policies have resulted in a more equitable sharing of paid and family work, this article presents longitudinal empirical data on the working patterns of women entitled to different forms of family leave. These show how changing regulations have led to the institutionalization of a “baby break” for younger women and to the promotion of labor market exclusion.     

Declining employment among young black less‐educated men: The role of incarceration and child support

In this paper, we explore the continuing decline in employment and labor force participation of nonenrolled Black men between the ages of 16 and 34 who have a high school education or less in the 1980s and 1990s. We focus on two fairly new developments: (1) the dramatic growth in the number of young Black men who have been incarcerated and (2) strengthened enforcement of child support policies. We analyze micro‐level data from the Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Groups (CPS‐ORG), into which state‐level data over time on incarceration rates and child support enforcement have been merged. Our results indicate that previous incarceration and child support enforcement can account for half or more of the decline in employment activity among Black men aged 25–34. Previous incarceration also contributes to the decline among those aged 16–24. © 2005 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Are Parental Welfare Work Requirements Good for Disadvantaged Children? Evidence From Age‐of‐Youngest‐Child Exemptions

This paper assesses the impact of welfare reform's parental work requirements on low‐income children's cognitive and social‐emotional development. The identification strategy exploits an important feature of the work requirement rules—namely, age‐of‐youngest‐child exemptions—as a source of quasi‐experimental variation in first‐year maternal employment. The 1996 welfare reform law empowered states to exempt adult recipients from the work requirements until the youngest child reaches a certain age. This led to substantial variation in the amount of time that mothers can remain home with a newborn child. I use this variation to estimate the impact of work‐requirement‐induced increases in maternal employment. Using a sample of infants from the Birth cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, the reduced form and instrumental variables estimates reveal sizable negative effects of maternal employment. An auxiliary analysis of mechanisms finds that working mothers experience an increase in depressive symptoms, and are less likely to breastfeed and read to their children. In addition, such children are exposed to nonparental child care arrangements at a younger age, and they spend more time in these settings throughout the first year of life.     

Tightened Immigration Policies and the Self‐Employment Dynamics of Mexican Immigrants

As the U.S. government has intensified its crackdown on illegal immigration in recent years, an important question to ask is how undocumented immigrants react to the stricter enforcement of immigration laws. This paper seeks to answer whether they increasingly choose self‐employment in an effort to avoid apprehension and subsequent deportation. To guard against endogeneity bias that might stem from increased enforcement in reaction to illegal immigration, the empirical analysis makes use of the September 11 terror attacks (9/11), which inadvertently triggered stricter immigration enforcement nationwide, as a natural experiment. Using a difference‐in‐differences approach and data from the Current Population Survey between 1996 and 2006, this paper examines the changes in the self‐employment choices of male and non‐citizen Mexican immigrants (a proxy for undocumented immigrants) compared to less‐educated Whites (the control group). The findings indicate that male and non‐citizen Mexican immigrants are substantially more likely (40 percent) to enter into self‐employment than less‐educated Whites after 9/11. The analysis further suggests that this finding is not driven by the 2001 recession that coincided with the terror attacks. The increased entries are mainly observed in the group that is most likely to be in the United States illegally and in those who face strong economic incentives. In addition, increased entries are not driven by increased unemployment among Mexican immigrants after the 9/11 event, but, rather, they reflect a change in the behavior of the unemployed Mexican immigrants, perhaps due to changes in perceived risks of detection and deportation.