Occupational Hazard? An Analysis of Birth Outcomes among Physician Mothers

Anupam B. Jena, David Slusky and Lilly Springer
Additional contact information
Anupam B. Jena: NBER
Lilly Springer: University of Kansas

No 16655, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Training to become a physician involves long work hours that can be physically demanding, particularly for surgeons. Are birth outcomes of physician mothers affected as a result? Using Texas birth data from 2007-2014, we compared birth outcomes between physicians and another highly educated group, lawyers, and between surgeons and non-surgeon physicians. Further, using a difference-in-differences framework, we examine whether the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education 2011 duty hour reform, which lowered trainee work hours, impacted the birth outcomes of babies born to physicians compared with lawyers. We find that physicians have lower birth weights and shorter pregnancies than lawyers with the results driven by physicians in surgical specialties. However, the duty hour reform appears to not have impacted birth outcomes. Thus, we find that physicians tend to have worse birth outcomes than lawyers and, in this case, the work reform did little to address the difference.

Keywords: physicians; surgeons; birth outcomes; birthweight; pregnancy length; duty hour reform (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J13 J44 K32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2023-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-hea, nep-lab and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp16655.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Occupational Hazard? An Analysis of Birth Outcomes Among Physician Mothers (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp16655

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().