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Maternity Leave and Mothers’ Long-Term Sickness Absence: Evidence From West Germany

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Demography

Abstract

Exploiting unique German administrative data, we estimate the association between an expansion in maternity leave duration from two to six months in 1979 and mothers’ postbirth long-term sickness absence over a period of three decades after childbirth. Adopting a difference-in-difference approach, we first assess the reform’s labor market effects and, subsequently, prebirth and postbirth maternal long-term sickness absence, accounting for the potential role of the reform in mothers’ selection into employment. Consistent with previous research, our estimates show that the leave extension caused mothers to significantly delay their return to work within the first year after childbirth. We then provide difference-in-difference estimates for the number and length of spells of long-term sickness absence among returned mothers. Our findings suggest that among those returned, mothers subject to the leave extension exhibit a higher incidence of long-term sickness absence compared with mothers who gave birth before the reform. This also holds true after we control for observable differences in prebirth illness histories. At the same time, we find no pronounced effects on mothers’ medium-run labor market attachment following the short-run delay in return to work, which might rationalize a negative causal health effect. Breaking down the results by mothers’ prebirth health status suggests that the higher incidence of long-term sickness absence among mothers subject to the reform may be explained by the fact that the reform facilitated the reentry of a negative health selection into the labor market.

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Notes

  1. Another reason why we focus on the 1979 reform is that subsequent maternity leave reforms in Germany gave rise to a variety of reform scenarios that varied according to whether the policies altered (1) the length of the job protection period, (2) the length of the paid leave period, (3) the monetary amount of the maternity benefit, or (4) several of these components simultaneously. Schönberg and Ludsteck (2014) found that the combination of these reform parameters may matter greatly for the effects on labor market outcomes. We therefore refrain from exploring the subsequent reforms because this would require a full discussion of all scenarios’ labor market effects and their health implications.

  2. Moreover, extensions of leave duration have also been shown to have a variety of unintended consequences. Puhani and Sonderhof (2011), for instance, documented that maternity leave extensions in Germany negatively affected job-related training for young women, irrespective of whether they have children.

  3. Data access was provided via onsite use at the Research Data Centre (FDZ) of the German Federal Employment Agency (BA) at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) and subsequent remote data access.

  4. The data do not allow us to measure the exact day of birth. We therefore set each child’s birthday on day 5 of its respective month of birth. As a result, the measured leave duration will be associated with a measurement error of up to +14/–15 days.

  5. Absence from unemployment may arise from the fact that an individual unemployed because of sickness is not available for the labor market. In such a case, she would not be obliged to accept job placements by the Federal Employment Agency.

  6. Our data record illness episodes only in excess of the mandatory duration of sickness pay to be paid by employers (six weeks). This implies that, for example, a spell of 5 days recorded in the data reflects a spell of 47 days (six weeks plus 5 days).

  7. The reform might theoretically also have had an effect on subsequent fertility, mediating its effect on health. Evidence from Austria (Lalive and Zweimüller 2009) and Sweden (Hoem 1993) has suggested that, for example, leave extensions opening up the possibility of renewing benefits by having another child without going back to work had a significant impact on subsequent births. However, these studies also suggested that this entailed a pure timing effect without affecting total fertility. The extension of maternity leave from two to six months observed in our study clearly was insufficient to allow for this kind of effect. Supplementary analyses based on our sample suggest that post-reform mothers did not experience more subsequent births than their pre-reform counterparts (more detailed results are available upon request).

  8. This number derives from ≈ (580,000 / 12) ⋅ 8. We have several reasons for not observing the full number of births. First, the data exclude or underreport employment histories of civil servants and the self-employed. Second, due to the data’s restriction to cohorts born after 1939, we do not observe all relevant cohorts at risk of birth in 1979. Third, until 1967, married women had the possibility to apply for an advance payment of their pension entitlements, in which case their pension records were completely deleted. Note, however, that this latter restriction is very unlikely to affect our sample selection given that these women should have had a weak attachment to the labor market.

  9. As we show later, the leave durations are fairly long: a large fraction of mothers continued to stay away from work at the end of the job protection period.

  10. However, these seasonal effects three years after childbirth are significant only after we control for observable characteristics. See Table S1 in Online Resource 1, which reports the difference-in-difference estimates with respect to the baseline differences in column 1 without including any controls.

  11. More precisely, the authors’ estimates of the differences in the return-to-work probability, the fraction employed, and the number of months worked are –30.5, –28.4, and –0.597, respectively (see Schönberg and Ludsteck 2014: table 1, column 1).

  12. Although Schönberg and Ludsteck (2014) obtained a 1 percentage point lower return-to-work probability 28 months after childbirth, our estimates three years after childbirth point to a positive, albeit insignificant, effect. Their results, however, are not directly comparable with ours because their analysis included a different set of control variables and is based on a data set that does not allow for a precise identification of career interruptions due to childbirth.

  13. In Table 4, the number of observations is reduced, compared with Table 3, because the health outcomes are measured conditional on being employed or unemployed. Note also that our health outcomes are measured for a larger group than those defined by our outcome indicator returned to work, which requires a mother to be employed for at least two consecutive months after childbirth.

  14. The negative health outcomes might also reflect a negative causal effect that might stem from the reform’s effect on mothers’ labor market participation at the intensive margin, thereby giving rise to an increased double burden. To address this issue, we also performed regressions with the number of months worked conditional on having returned to the labor market as the dependent variable. The estimates indicate that conditional on having returned, the effect on poor-health post-reform mothers’ cumulated months worked becomes much smaller. In particular, one and three years after childbirth, the insignificant estimated effects corresponding to those in columns 1 and 2 of Table 5 are –1.00 and 2.01, with standard errors of 1.08 and 3.25, respectively. This suggests that the positive effect on poor-health mothers’ months worked is mainly due to higher labor market participation and should rule out a negative causal effect of the reform via its impact on labor market participation at the intensive margin.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Hendrik Jürges, Martin Salm, the anonymous referees, and the editor of this journal for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department Labor Market Processes and Institutions, Institute for Employment Research, Regensburger Str. 104, 90478, Nuremberg, Germany

    Nicole Guertzgen

  2. University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany

    Nicole Guertzgen

  3. Centre for European Economic Research, Mannheim, Germany

    Nicole Guertzgen

  4. Institute of Sociology & Social Psychology, University of Cologne, Greinstr. 2, 50939, Cologne, Germany

    Karsten Hank

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Correspondence to Nicole Guertzgen.

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Appendix

Table 6 Description of individual employment history variables gained from the Pension Register
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Table 7 Description of individual characteristics gained from the Pension and Integrated Labor Market Biographies
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Guertzgen, N., Hank, K. Maternity Leave and Mothers’ Long-Term Sickness Absence: Evidence From West Germany. Demography 55, 587–615 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0654-y

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