Paid leave can help mothers return to work in the year that a child is born, but what about the next few years? On this episode of On the Evidence, we talk about the effects of paid leave on maternal labor force detachment up to four years after a child is born with Kelly Jones, an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at American University and a senior research economist at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

This episode is part of a series produced by Mathematica in support of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) and its fall research conference.

Find more about Jones' research, as well as other paid leave research presented at the 2019 APPAM conference, here: https://appam.confex.com/appam/2019/webprogram/Session13294.html

In the interview, Jones also mentions a second paper she was presenting at the conference on how abortion access affects educational outcomes. A summary of that paper is available here: https://appam.confex.com/appam/2019/webprogram/Paper31293.html