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Womb at work: the missing impact of maternal employment on newborn health

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  • Caroline Chuard

Abstract

Parental leave policies across the globe have become much more generous than they used to be. This is also true for prenatal maternal leave. While this may be costly in the short run, little is known about the effect of maternal employment during pregnancy on newborn health. In this paper, I exploit three sharp policy changes on the duration of paid parental leave in Austria that strongly affected the share of mothers who work up to the 32nd week of pregnancy. I use administrative data from Austria on the working history of women linked to the full Austrian birth register and coupled with a regression discontinuity framework to identify the effect of prenatal employment on their offspring. Maternal employment during pregnancy with the second child reacts strongly to these policy changes. The share of employed mothers sharply declined in 1990 by 19.1 percentage points, increased in 1996 by 7.2 percentage points and declined again by 6.4 percentage points in 2000. None of these changes in prenatal employment translated into effects on newborn health measured via birth weight, gestational length, and Apgar scores. This result holds true for mothers of different socioeconomic backgrounds and across industries. The effect is precisely estimated, which suggests that prenatal employment prior to the 32nd week of pregnancy does not causally affect the fetus for measures visible at birth.

Suggested Citation

  • Caroline Chuard, 2018. "Womb at work: the missing impact of maternal employment on newborn health," ECON - Working Papers 301, Department of Economics - University of Zurich.
  • Handle: RePEc:zur:econwp:301
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    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. Thesis Thursday: Caroline Chuard
      by Chris Sampson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog on 2019-12-19 07:00:00
    2. Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 5th October 2020
      by Chris Sampson in The Academic Health Economists' Blog on 2020-10-05 11:00:05

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    Cited by:

    1. Ahammer, Alexander & Halla, Martin & Schneeweis, Nicole, 2020. "The effect of prenatal maternity leave on short and long-term child outcomes," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(C).
    2. Chuard, Caroline, 2023. "Negative effects of long parental leave on maternal health: Evidence from a substantial policy change in Austria," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 88(C).
    3. Regmi, Krishna & Wang, Le, 2022. "Maternity Leave," GLO Discussion Paper Series 1184, Global Labor Organization (GLO).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Newborn health; maternal employment; pregnancy conditions; maternal leave;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I10 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - General
    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination

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