Publication Date

2022

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

First Advisor

Wilcox, Virginia

Degree Name

Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy)

Legacy Department

Department of Economics

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays on the relationship between paid maternity leave benefit offers and different labor market outcomes of women of childbearing age. The first essay examines the impact of paid maternity leave offers in fringe benefit packages on wages of this particular group of women. Since the access to paid maternity leave and wage can be simultaneously determined by other factors, this essay uses an instrumental variable approach to estimate the effect. The information on access to paid maternity leave and other covariates for this analysis is extracted from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97). The findings of this essay suggest that offerings of paid maternity leave in the fringe benefit packages help improve wages of women of childbearing age. Therefore, young working women with access to paid maternity leave benefits earn more than those who do not have access to paid maternity leave but are in the childbearing age. Using the same dataset, NLSY97, the second essay examines the relationship between paid maternity leave offers and job tenure for women of childbearing age. The possibility of endogeneity in paid maternity leave variable is appropriately checked while estimating the relationship between paid maternity leave offers and job tenure. The results suggest that paid maternity leave offers increase job tenure of women of childbearing age and adding partial wage replacement to the current federal unpaid maternity leave benefit will positively contribute to job attachment for young women. Finally, the third essay examines the importance of paid maternity leave offers in determining job satisfaction of women of childbearing age. The essay finds that paid maternity leave offers positively contributes to young women’s job satisfaction. In all these three essays, the prevalence of the importance of paid maternity leave offers in determining women's wages, job tenure, and job satisfaction are checked for subsamples of firms of similar sizes (based on the number of employees). The significance of the effect of paid maternity leave benefits in determining these three labor market outcomes is maintained in the sub-sample results.

Extent

107 pages

Language

eng

Publisher

Northern Illinois University

Rights Statement

In Copyright

Rights Statement 2

NIU theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from Huskie Commons for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without the written permission of the authors.

Media Type

Text

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