Chart of the Day: The Effects of Paid Family Leave Policies on Employers
My March was a mess, in part because COVID case rates finally fell low enough that my family felt comfortable traveling to see the rest of our family across the country. And the week preparing for that, the week of taking time off for that, and then the week recovering from that ate up most of my month.
I also keep reading great papers with no charts in them, which makes a blog premised on having a “Chart of the Day” awkward. But, I want to start blogging again, and I thought the paper “The Impact of Paid Family Leave on Employers: Evidence from New York” out this week as an NBER working paper by Ann P. Bartel, Maya Rossin-Slater, Christopher J. Ruhm, Meredith Slopen & Jane Waldfogel is really interesting. The only chart in the paper does not show their main/most interesting results, so isn’t a great candidate for the blog, but I’m pushing forward anyhow.
New York implemented a Paid Family Leave policy in January 2018. Before that policy was put into place, the researchers started surveying firms about employee performance, retention, and other things that could change with the increase in paid family leave in both New York and Pennsylvania (which did not have a PFL program). Then they compared the change in responses between pre-2018 and post-2018 between the two states.
They found that there was no measurable change in employee performance, which was consistently high in both state and both time periods. Firms in NY reported an increase in the ease of dealing with long absences, relative to those in PA. And there was an increase in leave taking for firms in NY, particularly at small firms (less than 50 employees) whose employees were not previously eligible for job-protected leave through FMLA.
The one and only chart in the paper shows the responses to a question asked only of NY firms on the support for the PFL law. Employers are largely supportive of the law, though support seems to deteriorate somewhat over time, with a particularly noticeable increase in the “Very Opposed” category.
My Reading Notes: