Journal article
Paid Parental Leave and Child Health in Australia
B BROADWAY, G Kalb, D Kuehnle, M Maeder
The Economic Record | Wiley | Published : 2017
Abstract
Providing mothers with access to paid parental leave may be an important public policy to improve child and maternal health. Using extensive informatioan from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, we estimate how paid parental leave entitlements influence children's health up to age 7. Exploiting detailed information on children's health, family background, mothers’ pre-birth work histories and mothers’ health behaviours during pregnancy, we show that paid parental leave entitlements go together with a reduced probability of a child having multiple ongoing health conditions, but show no significant correlation with any single condition. We find that the reduction in multiple conditi..
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Funding Acknowledgements
We thank the Group of Eight - DAAD Australian-German Research Cooperation Scheme for funding received for this project. Barbara Broadway and Guyonne Kalb are affiliated with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course. The paper uses data from Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). LSAC is conducted in partnership between the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS), the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). The findings and views reported in this paper are those of the authors alone and should not be attributed to DSS, AIFS or ABS. The authors wish to thank two anonymous referees and participants of the 2013 LSAC-LSIC Conference in Melbourne as well as participants of the doctoral workshop at the University of Erlangen-Nurnberg for helpful comments.