Maternal Displacements during Pregnancy and the Health of Newborns

Stefano Cellini, Livia Menezes and Martin Foureaux Koppensteiner
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Stefano Cellini: University of Surrey

Discussion Papers from Department of Economics, University of Birmingham

Abstract: In this paper, we estimate the effect of maternal displacements during pregnancy on birth outcomes by leveraging population-level administrative data from Brazil on formal employment linked to birth records. We find that involuntary job separation of pregnant single mothers leads to a decrease in birth weight (BW) by around 28 grams (-1% ca.) and an increase in the incidence of low BW by 10.5%. In contrast, we find a significant positive effect on the mean BW and a decrease in the incidence of low BW for mothers in a marriage or stable union. We document more pronounced negative effects for single mothers with lower earnings and no effect for mothers in the highest income quartile, suggesting a mitigating role of self-insurance from savings. Exploiting variation from unemployment benefits eligibility, we also provide evidence on the mitigating role of formal unemployment insurance using a Regression Discontinuity design exploiting the cutoff from the unemployment insurance eligibility rule.

Keywords: Dismissals; birth outcomes; informal insurance; unemployment insurance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D14 I10 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 pages
Date: 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ban, nep-dev, nep-hea, nep-ias and nep-lab
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https://repec.cal.bham.ac.uk/pdf/22-02.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Maternal Displacements during Pregnancy and the Health of Newborns (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bir:birmec:22-02

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