Maternity Leave and the Responsiveness of Female Labor Supply to a Household Shock

Emma Tominey ()

No 2013-016, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: Female labor supply can insure households against shocks to paternal employment. The paper estimates whether the female labor supply response to a paternal employment shock differs by eligibility to maternity employment protection. We exploit time-state variation in the implementation of unpaid maternity leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) in the US which increased employment protection from 0 to 12 weeks. We find that mothers eligible for FMLA speed up their return to work in response to a paternal shock, with a conditional probability of being in work 53% higher than in households with no paternal shock. In contrast, there was a negligible insurance response for mothers with no employment protection.

Keywords: female labor supply; insurance; maternity leave (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I30 J13 J20 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ias, nep-lab and nep-lma
Note: ECI
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Downloads: (external link)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Tominey_2013_maternity-leave.pdf First version, June 2013 (application/pdf)
http://ftp.iza.org/dp7462.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Maternity Leave and the Responsiveness of Female Labor Supply to a Household Shock (2013)
Working Paper: Maternity Leave and the Responsiveness of Female Labor Supply to a Household Shock (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hka:wpaper:2013-016

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