We’re going to continue thinking about non-experimental study design and about interpreting results of statistical analysis. We’ll read “Paid Parental Leave Laws in the United States: Does Short-Duration Leave Affect Women’s Labor-Force Attachment?”, written by Professor Byker in the Economics department. The paper is available on Canvas (it’s for Challenge question 3, so it will have a “CQ3” at the start under Modules > Readings).

Professor Byker studies the economics of gender and development. She teaches some very interesting courses on these subjects, in addition to a section of Econ 211 (the followup to this course)—I highly recommend you take one or more of her classes.

Discuss the following questions as a group. Professor Rao will visit each group to help clarify any questions you may have. Nominate a member of your group to communicate your thoughts/conclusions to the class as a whole when we reconvene.

How much do paid parental leave laws affect female labor force attachment?

In this paper, Professor Byker explores the question of how paid parental leave laws affect female labor force attachment. The US is unusual among wealthy countries in not requiring paid maternity/paternity leave at the federal level; most other wealthy countries mandate this. Paid parental leave is important for family formation and development, as it reduces the costs of having children and makes it easier for parents (particularly women, who often bear the brunt of childcare) to return to the labor force after having kids. This is an especially important topic for many reasons; I offer two of them below:

  1. Women often bear unequal burdens in household labor (particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic—female labor force participation has just dropped substantially). Not protecting their ability to return to work after having kids further exacerbates inequality among genders and households (with single-parent households being disproportionately impacted), and can have dramatic macroeconomic consequences.

  2. Birth rates are falling in many places around the world; while many have historically worried about overpopulation, today there are growing concerns about underpopulation and population collapse in the long run.

You don’t need to read the links now—class time is short!—but I highly encourage you to return to them after class.

1. How does Professor Byker measure the effect of paid parental leave laws on female labor force participation?
  1. What data does she use? Does she have experimental data?
2. How does she design her study?
  1. How does Professor Byker measure the effect of paid parental leave laws?
  2. What is her argument for her estimates being causal rather than just correlative?
  3. What kinds of issues would have to be present in order to threaten the validity of the causal inference in this study?
3. Interpreting results
  1. What are the key results Professor Byker finds?
  2. What do the p-values in Figure 1b mean?
  3. What does Figure 1a show?