
Paid maternity leave has high cost and little benefit - yummyfajitas
http://www.mitpressjournals.org.sci-hub.cc/doi/abs/10.1162/REST_a_00602#.V-z7SZMrKEI
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andreareina
> Abstract—We assess the case for generous government-funded maternity leave,
> focusing on a series of policy reforms in Norway that expanded paid leave
> from 18 to 35 weeks. We find the reforms do not crowd out unpaid leave and
> that mothers spend more time at home without a reduction in family income.
> The increased maternity leave has little effect on children’s schooling,
> parental earnings and labor force participation, completed fertility,
> marriage, or divorce. The expansions, whose net costs amounted to 0.25% of
> GDP, have negative redistribution properties and imply a considerable
> increases in taxes at a cost to economic efficiency.

Some points of my own:

* It doesn't explore the effects of _no_ paid leave. We can expect that going from 18 to 35 weeks will have a smaller effect than going from 0 to 18.

* There is a note of paid leave being regressive since the program replaced 100% of income; higher-income mothers received more benefits. This ignores the benefit of not penalizing having children, several of which are noted in the wiki[1]

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_leave)

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dalke
Following on your first point, the paper (grudgingly, IMO) says:

> Whether the initial eighteen weeks is worth the roughly $419 million in
> annual costs can be debated, since Carneiro et al. (2015) find some benefits
> associated with the initial reform.

The citation is: Carneiro, P., K. V. Løken, and K. Salvanes, “A Flying Start?
Maternity Leave Benefits and Long Run Outcomes of Children,” Journal of
Political Economy 123 (2015), 365–412. -
[http://harris.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/Salvanes%20af...](http://harris.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/Salvanes%20aflyingstart_22feb2013.pdf)
. Its abstract is:

> We study the impact on children of increasing maternity leave benefits using
> a reform that increased paid and unpaid maternity leave in Norway in July
> 1977. Mothers giving birth before this date were eligible only for 12 weeks
> of unpaid leave, while those giving birth after were entitled to 4 months of
> paid leave and 12 months of unpaid leave. This increased time with the child
> led to a 2 percentage points decline in high school dropout and a 5 %
> increase in wages at age 30. The effect is especially large for children of
> those mothers who, prior to the reform, would take very low levels of unpaid
> leave.

