Last month, I attended the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management’s annual conference. This was a meeting of people from seemingly every academic discipline whose research was at all related to public policy. More than many other conferences, APPAM is a great opportunity to learn about new developments in some of the fields that impact our work as policy analysts.
The first session I attended was focused on the impacts of paid family leave programs. Paid family leave is the policy that allows new parents to take paid time off work when they give birth to or adopt a child. Usually people who take paid leave do not earn 100% of their paycheck while on leave, but it still puts more money into the pockets of people to take time off work to bond with their children.
All of the presenters asked slightly different questions about paid leave policies, but there was one conclusion that was consistent across all three papers: paid family leave policies do not do a good job of keeping new mothers attached to the labor force.
Viewed through the narrow lens of labor economics, it seemed as though paid family leave was an ineffective policy. These papers touched on some ancillary impacts, but these presentations were largely focused on the labor market.
This is one of the most important differences between academic research and policy analysis: academics can focus on getting the most accurate results possible on a single aspect of a policy, while analysts need to synthesise all the information they can find about a particular policy to look at it holistically.
In the case of paid family leave, we as analysts should not just be interested in the labor market impacts, but in every way this could change peoples lives. I would have loved to hear more discussion about the poverty impacts of paid family leave, or more about how paid family leave impacted the firms that had to respond to this new policy.
Another important consideration is how this might lead to intergenerational effects. With any policy that impacts children, especially newborns, we need to consider not just what the effects are today but what sort of investment we are making in the long run. A robust paid family leave policy could potentially contribute to better developmental outcomes for children, improved health for both parents and children, higher wages in the future, and other positive impacts that come from a small boost delivered early on.
Additionally, policy analysts need to keep our research focused on policies that could reasonably exist. For example, it isn’t feasible for policy makers to implement a paid family leave program that would pay individuals 300% of their salary for a full year. It’s obviously not sustainable, so policy analysts shouldn’t waste time exploring it. It might be an interesting question for an academic to approach though, just to see if there are any interesting insights we can glean from such an outlandish policy idea.
Policy analysis is inherently interdisciplinary. To see the whole picture on certain issues, analysts need to account for information from multiple perspectives. I enjoyed all the papers I heard about paid family leave at this conference and I feel much better prepared to account for the labor market impacts of paid family leave. Still, my analyst brain was left wanting a much broader discussion about all of the potential impacts.