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.
Conditioning a monetary benefit on individuals’ family status can create distortions, even in individuals’ seemingly personal decisions, such as the birth of a child. Birth timing and its response to various policies has been studied by economists in several papers. However, pregnancy timing – i.e. the timing of conception – and its response to policy announcements has not been examined. This paper makes use of a 21-month lag between announcing California’s introduction of the first paid parental leave program in the United States and its scheduled implementation to evaluate whether women timed their pregnancies in order to be eligible for the expected benefit. Using natality data, documenting all births in the United States, a difference-in-differences approach compares California births to births in states outside of California before the program’s introduction and in 2004, the year California introduced paid parental leave. The results show that the distribution of California births in 2004 significantly shifted from the first half of the year to the second half of the year, immediately after the program’s implementation. While the effect is present for all population segments of new mothers, it is largest for disadvantaged mothers – with lower education levels, of Hispanic origin, younger, and not married. These results shed light on the population segments most affected by the introduction of paid parental leave and on the equitable nature of paid parental leave policies.
The notion that public transportation can mitigate accidents has been widely claimed but to-date empirical evidence that supports this relationship in a causal manner is scarce. We present results from difference-indifferences (DID) and triple differences (DDD) frameworks that exploit the introduction of late-night buses (night buses) into cities in Israel beginning in 2007. Our preferred DDD estimation utilizes spatial, temporal, and time-of-day variation in estimating the effect of night bus frequencies on accident outcomes. The results show a reduction in accidents involving young drivers in response to night buses, on the order of magnitude of 37% in the mean metropolitan area served by night buses. Injuries resulting from these accidents also decrease by 24%. Our results are robust to alternative DDD estimations, which utilize variation in the day of the week that night buses operate. Overall, the results suggest that public transportation-and in particular late-night public transportation-can entail substantial benefits in terms of road accident reductions.
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