State mandates for maternity leave: Impact on wages, employment, and access to leave
Abstract
During the 1980's, several states passed legislation requiring employers to include maternity leave in their benefits packages. The first essay of this dissertation estimates the impact of these particular state laws on women's employment and wages. The second essay estimates their impact on the percent of women with access to maternity leave and on whether employers respond to the mandates by hiring part time women generally not covered by state mandates. Maternity leave mandates may decrease market demand for female labor. If access to leave is valuable to women, they may increase the supply of female labor. The net result of the two shifts is a decrease in women's wages. I find mandates are associated with a 4.9 percent decrease in women's wages over six years. Women's employment could either increase or decrease as a result of the shifts in demand and supply. If the supply increase is larger than the demand decrease, employment will increase; if the opposite is true, it will decrease. I find that, even in the face of failing wages, women's employment increases after mandates are passed. Employers may respond to the cost of maternity leave by hiring part time women who are generally not covered by state maternity leave mandates. However, I find no evidence that such shifts occur. The increase in the percent of employed women with access to maternity leave in mandate states relative to non-mandate states is 3.7 percent.
Recommended Citation
Carol Kallman Kane,
"State mandates for maternity leave: Impact on wages, employment, and access to leave"
(January 1, 1998).
Boston College Dissertations and Theses.
Paper AAI9915562.
http://escholarship.bc.edu/dissertations/AAI9915562
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