Infertility currently affects over 6 million individuals in the United States. While most health insurance plans nationwide do not cover infertility diagnoses or treatments, to date fifteen states have enacted some form of infertility insurance mandate. In this paper, I use data from the Vital Statistics Detail Natality Data and Census population estimates to examine whether these state-level mandates were successful in increasing fertility rates. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I exploit variation in the enactment of mandates both across states and over time, and identify control groups that should not have been affected by infertility coverage. My results suggest that the mandates significantly increase first birth rates for women over 35, and these results are robust to a number of specification tests.
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Paper provided by EconWPA in its series Labor and Demography with number
0511014.
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.:
Rajeev Dehejia & Adriana Lleras-Muney, 2004.
"Booms, Busts, and Babies’ Health,"
Working Papers
250, Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Health and Wellbeing..
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