Last month, my colleague Michael Hartnett and I attended the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management’s Fall Research Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. He and I have been doing a bit of work with the Rise Together Innovation Institute on paid leave family policies so Michael attended a few sessions on the effects on paid leave programs.
The researchers at this leading public policy research conference focused most squarely on proximate impacts of paid family leave: who takes leave, impacts on the gender wage gap, and impacts on firms.
While these impacts are important, they tell us little about the most promising aspects of paid family leave: the impact on children of having the individualized attention that paid leave facilitates.
Nobel Prize Winner James Heckman argues educational investments in very young children have higher yields than educational investments in older children and much higher yields than investment in adults. If he is right, that means paying parents to stay home with very young children could yield even higher benefits than already very-effective investments like high-quality early education for three- and four-year-olds.
As we puzzled over the lack of research on long-term impacts presented at APPAM, our prayers for evidence were answered. Just last month, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel hill, Washington University at St. Louis, and the Brazilian School of Economics and Finance released a working paper on the intergenerational impacts of paid family leave.
These researchers used 40 years of survey data covering two generations coinciding with changes in paid family leave policies to see how these changes in leave policies impacted children’s outcomes down the road.
One impact these researchers found was on education and wages for children. Children born under policies that protected leave for parents ended up having higher levels of education and wages than children who did not.
The researchers also found an intergenerational mobility impact of paid leave policies. Children of mothers with lower levels of education tended to have more education if their parents lived under a protected leave policy than children with parents who did not.
Researchers also found that parents under protected leave policies tended to spend more time with children and increase spending on child care for children. This suggests that protected leave policies may have led to more parental investment in children, leading to better educational and labor market outcomes for children.
The researchers also found drawbacks to the protected parental leave policies. They found the “motherhood penalty” of lower wages for mothers was exacerbated under these policies. They also found the policy increased the chance of having a first child but decreased chances of having a second child in the family.
Many municipalities in Ohio are moving forward on paid family leave. In 2016, Cleveland suburb Newburgh Heights made national news when it passed a 6-month paid leave policy for employees–reported as the most progressive in the country at the time. Since, Cleveland, Columbus, and other cities across Ohio have passed paid family leave policies for employees. Even the state of Ohio quietly expanded paid family leave in its most recent budget.
Paid family leave seems like a good benefit for new parents, but it is an especially promising intervention for children. Ensuring parents can give individualized attention to children at the most crucial stage of development could have impacts that cascade across the generations.
This commentary first appeared in the Ohio Capital Journal.