Today, many pregnant women take a brief period of time off from work to give birth. In this paper, I identify the effects of pregnancy employment on health at birth. My initial results show that pregnancy employment has beneficial effects. However, these effects often become statistically insignificant when I control for earnings from pregnancy employment, when I exclusively examine women employed prior to the pregnancy, and when I examine siblings in fixed effects models. I conclude that beneficial effects of pregnancy employment are partially due to increased family income via earnings during the pregnancy and partially due to unobserved heterogeneity. There is no evidence that increased female labor force participation adversely affects health at birth.
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Paper provided by Middle Tennessee State University, Department of Economics and Finance in its series Working Papers with number
200408.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Gary S. Becker & Nigel Tomes, 1994.
"X. Human Capital and the Rise and Fall of Families,"
NBER Chapters,
in: Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (3rd Edition), pages 257-298
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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