Increased paid maternitiy leave and children's development measured at age four to five. An empirical analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Parental leave policies are often enacted based on the premise that children will bene.t from an extended period of time spent with their parent. A number of research studies have looked at the effect of maternal time investments on the early development of skills, behavioral well-being and health, but the results thus far are mixed and mainly based on multivariate analysis. This approach can often not eliminate selection bias and can rarely predict the sign and magnitude of the bias. In this paper, I evaluate the effect of extended maternal care on children’s development at age 4 to 5 using observational data prior to and after the Canadian parental leave reform, which extended total paid leave from 25 to 50 weeks on December 31st, 2000. Previous research exploiting this labor supply shock found that mothers significantly increased their time at home in the first year, but generally found no significant effects on parent-reported measures of development between age 7 and 24 months. For the first time in this literature, children of mothers receiving maternity leave benefits are identified and compared with all other children. Using matching difference-in-differences, I find that the policy change had positive effects on cognitive development, measured using different standardized tests for children aged 4 and 5. Behavioral development effects are mixed and mainly not significant. Effects on the family environment and parent-reported health measures are positive and significant.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".