California's Paid Family Leave Law and the Employment of 45-64 Year Old Adults

Ann P. Bartel (), Soohyun Kim (), Christopher Ruhm and Jane Waldfogel ()
Additional contact information
Ann P. Bartel: Columbia University
Soohyun Kim: Columbia University
Jane Waldfogel: Columbia University

No 14380, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Paid family leave allows workers to take time off from work to care for a family member with a serious health condition, with reduced financial risk and increased job continuity. In 2004, California was the first state in the nation to implement a paid family leave program allowing workers to take up to eight weeks off work with partial pay to care for their own or a family member's serious health condition. While the effects of California's law on the labor supply of parents of newborns have been extensively studied, the role of paid family leave in the labor supply of workers who may need to provide care for a spouse has not been studied widely. We examine the effects of California's law on the employment of workers who are aged 45-64 and have a disabled spouse, using the 2001-2008 American Community Survey. Our preferred estimates suggest the paid leave program increased the employment of 45-64 year old women with a disabled spouse in California by around 0.9 percentage points (or 1.4% on a pre-law base rate of 65.9%) in the post-law period compared to their counterparts in other states, with a 2.9 percentage point rise in private sector employment. The employment of men with a disabled spouse in California also increased, but by a smaller amount: 0.7 percentage points (or 0.8% on a pre-law base 86.8%) (with a non-significant 0.4 percentage point decrease in private sector employment).

Keywords: older workers; paid family leave; employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 J20 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2021-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-hea and nep-lma
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: Work, Aging and Retirement, 2023, 9 (2), 169–178

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp14380.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:iza:izadps:dp14380

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 ().