The Longer the Better? The Effects of Maternity Leave on Childhood and Adolescent Outcomes in China

Despite the wide provision of maternity leave, research on the direct impacts of maternity leave legislation on children’s early and long term outcomes has been relatively scarce. While the small but recently growing literature on this mostly studies Canada and Scandinavian countries, this paper is among the first to analyze the effects of maternity leave expansions on early childhood and later outcomes in China.
Using data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey and the Chinese Censuses, the paper evaluates the effects on children's education and health outcomes of a policy reform in China that increased maternity leave from 56 to 90 days in September 1988 (in addition to the national expansion, provinces offered extra leave to women having a late birth or with one child only). The empirical analysis employs both a difference-in-differences design, which exploits the variation in leave expansions across provinces and different groups of women, and a regression discontinuity design, which compares children born around the cutoff point when the policy took effect. Positive effects of the leave expansion on childhood and adolescent development are expected to be found. The findings offer new insight into the impacts of maternity leave from a country with different maternity leave and child care institutions.