The effects of parental leave on child health and postnatal care: Evidence from Australia

What is it about?

One of the arguments that is advanced in support of paid maternity leave policies is that the mother's time away from work, around childbirth, is expected to improve child health and development. We employ micro-level data from Australia to examine the effects of parental leave on measures of child health and the provision of health inputs to the child. We found that parental leave around childbirth was significantly associated with prolonged breastfeeding, up-to-date immunisation and other positive effects on some chronic health conditions such as asthma, bronchiolitis. For example, children of mothers who took an additional week of paid maternity leave have a lower probability of having asthma and bronchiolitis (1.1 and 0.5 percentage points less likely, respectively).They are also slightly more likely to be breastfed until one month and 6 months of age (2.1 and 0.6 percentage points, respectively)

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Why is it important?

An extended random effects estimator is used to control for selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity in this study. This study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt to examine the relationship between parental leave and child health using household-level data in Australia.