AME Labour Economics Seminar, at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI).

Jessica Pac from University of Wisconsin-Madison presents The Effect of State Pregnancy Accommodation Laws on Infant Health (joint work with Yulia Dudareva, and Alejandra Ros Pilarz).

This is an in-person only event.
 

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Abstract

In the absence of a federal law requiring employers to provide reasonable workplace accommodations to pregnant women in the United States, 31 states passed their own pregnancy accommodation laws that substantially expand protections beyond the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act.  Pregnancy accommodation laws should theoretically enable pregnant women to continue working during pregnancy to prevent earnings and income losses and to retain employer-sponsored health insurance and eligibility for unpaid and paid family leave in eligible states. As the loss of employment and income can be detrimental during pregnancy, a central question is whether pregnancy accommodation laws impact infant health, a strong predictor for adulthood health and human capital. To answer this question, we exploit the exogenous rollout of state pregnancy accommodation laws between 1999 and 2017 using difference-and-difference and difference-in-difference-in-differences frameworks to estimate the laws’ impact on fertility, infant mortality, and three key measures of health at birth: birthweight, gestational age, and weight-for-age birth and death records from the National Vital Statistics System. As pregnant women working in physically strenuous jobs are more likely to benefit from these laws, we limit our difference-in-differences sample to births that occur in counties with high proportions of women working in physically demanding occupations; we compare this group to births that occur in counties with low proportion of women working in physical-demanding jobs in our difference-in-difference-in-differences models. Our results suggest that pregnancy accommodation laws increase birth weight and fertility rates, with relatively larger fertility effects for Black mothers and larger increases in birth weight for children born to mothers with less than a college education. Our findings highlight the need for and potential benefits of a federal pregnancy accommodations law, providing support for the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2021.