EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Family Leave after Childbirth and the Health of New Mothers

Pinka Chatterji and Sara Markowitz

No 14156, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: In the United States, almost a third of new mothers who worked during pregnancy return to work within three months of childbirth. Current public policies in the U.S. do not support long periods of family leave after childbirth, although some states are starting to change this. As such, it is vital to understand how length of family leave during the first year after childbirth affects families' health and wellbeing. The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between family leave length, which includes leave taking by mothers and fathers, and behavioral and physical health outcomes among new mothers. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study - Birth Cohort, we examine measures of depression, overall health status, and substance use. We use a standard OLS as well as an instrumental variables approach with county-level employment conditions and state-level maternity leave policies as identifying instruments. The results suggest that longer maternity leave from work, both paid and un-paid, is associated with declines in depressive symptoms, a reduction in the likelihood of severe depression, and an improvement in overall maternal health. We also find that having a spouse that did not take any paternal leave after childbirth is associated with higher levels of maternal depressive symptoms. We do not find, however, that length of paternal leave is associated with overall maternal health, and we find only mixed evidence that leave length after childbirth affects maternal alcohol use and smoking.

JEL-codes: I0 J08 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-lab
Note: CH EH LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Published as “Family Leave after Childbirth and the Health of New Mothers” (with Pinka Chatterji). Journal of Men tal Health Policy and Economics. 15:2 (June 2012) 61 - 76

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14156.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:nbr:nberwo:14156

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w14156

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14156