1. California New Parent Leave Act effective in 2019 allows some employees that have worked for an empower for at least a year and have worked at least 1,250 hours in the 12 moths prior to leave to take leave for up to 12 weeks to take care of a new child.
2. Evaluation of the effects of the policy on maternal and child health are important to understand how labor laws affect family health. While the New Parent Leave Act applies to men and women, evaluation of the impact on employment opportunities for women of childbearing age is also necessary. Employers need to maintain health insurance and the hold the current position but time taken off under the new law is unpaid. It would be interesting to see if employees actually take the full 12 weeks and if the shortened time changes the impact on health outcomes.
3. The New Parent Leave Act expands the Family and Medical Leave Act and the California Family Rights Act to employers with 20 or more people. This may expand who is eligible for parental leave. I would be interested in low wage workers as a sample group and the effect of the Act on outcomes such as self-reported health, blood pressure, parental stress, exclusive breastfeeding and immunization compliance.
4. In order to look at the effects of the New Parent Leave Act, we would need microdata from a California population survey before and after the act. Statistically we could use a difference-in-difference design to compare the changes in outcomes before and after the Act implementation. We could compare these differences with corresponding comparison groups that were not affected by the new law.
5. Challenges to drawing inferences about the impact of the policy on health arise in distilling the independent effects of a law on downstream health outcomes that are also influenced by many other contextual variables For example, interactions between stable employment and health outcomes, dual income families, type of pregnancy and childbirth etc.