Why

What

Who

Only 12% of U.S. private companies offer workers some kind of paid leave. 

Paid parental leave provides a specified number of paid weeks or months off from work to care and bond with a newborn or adopted child.

Contributions would be collected from employee paychecks and the percent would be based on individual, rather than household, income. 

We model program for 100% contributions up to 12 weeks for working parents. We estimate nearly 2,934,000 mothers and 161,000 fathers would participate through the United States.

For a $715 million investment in administrative costs for one year covering 2,094,707 new mothers and fathers ($341.41 per participant)

We use a variety of data sources to tailor our analysis to the location and to make our estimates as accurate as possible. However, sometimes data is unavailable, either because it has not been collected, or because it is not shared publicly. We encourage government agencies and other organizations to share their de-identified data online and researchers to prioritize the following gaps in the data.

Duration of Months Breastfeeding - A distribution of months breastfeeding was unavailable, so we simulated a distribution using a few key data points and a Poisson distribution to estimate the increase in the percentage of mothers breastfeeding 6 or more months. 

Income Distribution - The distribution of high earners seemed important to drill down into when discussing contributions. However, the highest bracket of earnings reported on the American Community Survey is $100,000+. Therefore we combined this data with more detailed information on the upper income distribution from another source.

High School Dropout - Cohort High School Dropout Rates were particularly  difficult and time-consuming to track down for most states. We managed to find it for five states, as well as the dropout rate for low-socioeconomic status students. We paired this information with cohort graduation from all 50 states to impute the dropout rate for missing states

Postpartum Depression - This measure was unavailable for many states. In these cases we used the national average of 15.8% of new mothers in its place.