Abstract
This paper quantifies the effects of Russia’s 1981 expansion in maternity benefits on completed childbearing. The program provided one year of partially paid parental leave and a small cash transfer upon a child’s birth. I exploit the program’s two-stage implementation and find evidence that women had more children as a result of the program. Fertility rates rose immediately by 8.2% over twelve months. The increase in fertility rates not only persisted for the ten-year duration of the program, but it reflected large increases in higher-order births to older women who already had children before the program started.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-2018
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_00713
Related Content
A supplemental appendix is available online at http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/suppl/10.1162/rest_a_00713.
Repository Citation
Malkova, Olga, "Can Maternity Benefits Have Long-Term Effects on Childbearing? Evidence from Soviet Russia" (2018). Economics Faculty Publications. 4.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/economics_facpub/4
Supplemental Appendix
Included in
Benefits and Compensation Commons, Economics Commons, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies Commons, Statistics and Probability Commons
Notes/Citation Information
Published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, v. 100, issue 4, p. 691-703.
© 2018 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The copyright holder has granted the permission for posting the article here.