Evaluating Maternity Leave Reforms When RD Fails

Clara von Bismarck-Osten and Andrei Zeleneev

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: This paper documents that expansions of UK maternity pay in the 2000s improved children's test scores while reducing maternal employment. Extending job protection alone generated similar employment effects but no detectable impact on children. None of these effects are recoverable with a conventional regression discontinuity (RD) design because eligibility is only imperfectly captured by the available data. We explain why existing corrections for measurement error in RD are not well suited and propose a simple imputation-based solution. The approach preserves RD's main advantages, nonparametric identification and transparency, and remains valid even when measurement error has economic content.

Date: 2026-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.41881 Latest version (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:arx:papers:2610.41881

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().