“The Incidence of Mandated Maternity Benefits”, 1994-06 ():
I consider the labor-market effects of mandates which raise the costs of employing a demographically identifiable group. The efficiency of these policies will be largely dependent on the extent to which their costs are shifted to group-specific wages.
I study several state and federal mandates which stipulated that childbirth be covered comprehensively in health insurance plans, raising the relative cost of insuring women of childbearing age.
I find substantial shifting of the costs of these mandates to the wages of the targeted group. Correspondingly, I find little effect on total labor input for that group.
[David Henderson: Who Pays for the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act? In June 1994, the American Economic Review published “The Incidence of Mandated Maternity Benefits” by Jonathan Gruber, at the time an assistant professor of economics at Harvard University. What he was able to do was compare the growth of pay in states that already had mandated pregnancy benefits with the growth in states that didn’t have mandates. He hypothesized that in states without mandates, pay for married women of child-bearing age would grow more slowly once the PDA came into force than in states that already had the mandates. And that’s what he found.
He wrote:
The findings consistently suggest shifting of the costs of the mandates on the order of 100%, with little effect on net labor input.
In short, the women who are supposed to benefit from the mandate are the ones who pay.]
See Also:
Do Labor Market Policies have Displacement Effects? Evidence from a Clustered Randomized Experiment
Protective State Policies and the Employment of Fathers with Criminal Records
Does Biology Drive Child Penalties? Evidence from Biological and Adoptive Families
The Role of Premarket Factors in Black-White Wage Differences