On January 17, 2024, Elizabeth Ananat, Mallya Professor of Women and Economics, and colleagues published a new policy brief for the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, titled “The Benefits and Costs of Expanding Paid Parental Leave in New York State.”
For their research, Ananat and her co-authors developed aggregate estimates of the benefits and costs of providing income support to mothers as they bond with their newborns during maternity leave. They then used these figures to estimate the benefits and costs of a proposed expansion to New York’s paid family leave program.
Results show that in addition to improving infants’ health in childhood, paid leave to care for and bond with newborns also increases future earnings in adulthood. Furthermore, Ananat and her colleagues found that the current discounted value to society these benefits bring is more than 20 times the annual cost of paid leave programs. As a result, the research team asserts that expanding paid family leave in New York would be highly beneficial. These findings indicate that increasing the wage replacement rate from 67% to 90% for workers with low incomes and extending eligibility to workers with four weeks of consecutive employment, rather than the current requirement of 26 weeks, could create at least $2.3 billion in additional benefits to society at a cost of only $102 million more than the state’s current programs.