Thank you. Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm happy to be here.
In the area you're investigating, the area I know about is the impact of the maternity and parental leave provisions of the EI system, so that's primarily what I'll talk to. The research I've done in this area has been performed against the background of what I'll claim are the commonly cited goals of maternity leave policy, which include the following.
These leaves provide mothers an opportunity to recover after giving birth, physically. They provide mother and child a period to bond. They promote pre- and post-natal care of the child. They promote the long-run status of women by facilitating employment continuity when giving birth. And finally, they can promote child development.
The research I've done in this area takes two forms. One is an historical look at what's happened over the last 30 years, and the other research is specifically on what the effects were of the 2000 reforms of the EI system, which extended parental leave benefits. Let me start briefly with the historic perspective, and the research is parsed into three segments.
The first segment looks at the period up to 1990. The EI maternity leave benefits were introduced in 1971, but that only provided income compensation. Your rights to job protection were provided by provincial labour standards. So during this period, a lot of provincial labour standards did not actually agree or weren't the same as the EI provisions, and were slowly, gradually brought up to that level.
Looking at that period, what we find is that those changes in provincial laws did not actually affect the amount of time women were at home with their children post-birth. The provisions were quite modest at that time. We're talking about getting up to about 15 weeks, and presumably women found other ways to stay at home post-birth.
What it did do, however, we found, was increase the probability that women returned to their pre-birth employer after giving birth, and therefore it decreased the proportion of women who quit before giving birth.
The second two major reforms of the EI system in this regard, the 1990 reforms and the 2000 reforms, had to do with parental leave benefits. The 1990 reforms brought in parental leave benefits. The 2000 reforms extended them. These benefits in principle can be taken by either the mother or father, but at least initially they were taken primarily by the mother. That's changing, but changing slowly.
What we found from these two reforms is they had two effects. One is that they did increase the amount of time women were at home with their children post-birth, but also had this effect of increasing the probability that they stayed with their pre-birth employer. That's considered important, because breaks in jobs with birth is one of the reasons women are thought to fall behind men in their labour market earnings as they age. They do not get to accumulate the skills that are specific to a particular job if those keep getting broken off—there are discontinuities, if you want. They're moving up, then they get pushed down, then they move up. So the job continuity is considered an important contributor to the continued economic progress of women.
The second area of the research looks specifically at the 2000 reforms that, if I were to generalize, extended leave from six months to one year. I would argue that when we're thinking of that extension and thinking about why we do that, concerns about child development come to the forefront, and concerns about women's health and women's economic progress take a back burner, because leaves of six months, for most women wanting to return to work, provide the opportunity for the physical recovery from birth and the opportunity to go back to their old employer. So what primarily the extension from six months to one year does is provide more time at home, potentially, with the child.
The evidence we've gotten from looking at this reform includes a number of things—and when I say “we” here, I've completed most of this research with Kevin Milligan, who's an economics professor at the University of British Columbia.
First, we estimate across all mothers that reform in 2000 increased the amount of time women were at home with their children post-birth by about two months, and that was on top of an average stay at home of eight months prior to the reform.
That estimate, though, includes some mothers who couldn't actually take advantage of this. Estimates are that about a quarter of mothers have no insured employment prior to giving birth and therefore cannot qualify for EI maternity leave or parental leave benefits.
When we try to focus specifically on the mothers who were eligible, we estimate that the increase in time at home with children was three months, from a pre-reform average of about six months. This represents a 50% increase in the amount of time these mothers were at home with their children after giving birth.
What would these mothers have been doing otherwise, if they weren't at home? It would be primarily full-time work, and their children would primarily be in unlicensed care provided by a non-relative in someone else's home.
Those two facts are important, because other research suggests it's full-time work by mothers in the first year of life that potentially has detrimental effects on child development, and because unlicensed family care is typically not viewed as the highest quality of child care that's available at those ages.
When we think, then, of what might have happened to children as a result of these reforms, we look at two avenues. One is any impact of the change in EI provisions, and of changes in provincial labour standards that increase job protection to match the duration of the EI benefits, upon breastfeeding behaviour.
What are the effects? Breastfeeding is widely viewed as very positive for children, and the most recent research—for example, by Michael Kramer's team at McGill—suggests that it may actually have positive effects on IQ. We find that as a result of the changes in the EI and provincial labour standards in 2000, the duration of breastfeeding in the first year of life went up by one month. Increases in exclusive breastfeeding were on the order of half a month.
What does this mean? I can give you more impressive statistics, but I will have to qualify the point. The proportion of women attaining six months of exclusive breastfeeding, which is a recommendation both of the World Health Organization and of various national medical associations in the developed world, increased by 39%. This sounds big, but we have to remember that the proportions actually achieving six months of exclusive breastfeeding are quite low. So it's a big increase in a small number.
We also find no effect on the incidence of breastfeeding; that is, it didn't change the proportion of women who actually started to breastfeed.
Corresponding with this were reductions on the order of 50% in the proportion of mothers who introduced food because they had to return to work or who stopped breastfeeding because they had to return to work. This is important, I think, because when we think of the various strategies governments take to promote breastfeeding, they typically focus on education—either letting mothers know the benefits of breastfeeding or helping them actually establish breastfeeding in the first weeks of life.
That clearly is important, but to achieve goals such as six months of exclusive breastfeeding or two years of breastfeeding with food, clearly education isn't going to do the trick, when most mothers claim that the reason they stop is that they have to return to work. We have to look at a different set of policies.
So this is evidence that maternity leave and parental leave, in terms of both job protection and income replacement, which is the primary function of EI, have a positive effect on breastfeeding behaviour of mothers in Canada.
When we turn to child development or health, we don't find much. Here we are relying on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. In terms of health, we don't find any strong effects on children's health or mothers' health. This includes information on mothers' depression, on any postpartum problems, on children's overall health, or the incidence of specific ailments, including asthma, bronchitis—primarily respiratory diseases.
We also don't find any effects on children's development—and this is early development: measures of their temperament, their socio-motor development, or their achievement of certain milestones up to 24 months of age.
These are very early measures of development. Because the reform was so recent and data takes a while to come out, we can now only observe children who were exposed to the longer provision, the longer duration of parental and maternity leave, up to about 24 months. Data has just come out—I say this because I was actually working on it last Tuesday—that is now going to let us look at children up to age four and five who were exposed to this new regime. At this point we'll start getting some cognitive developmental indicators: their ability to recognize numbers, their ability to read. This is potentially important, as I said, because there is other evidence that suggests breastfeeding may have important implications for IQ.
So overall, as I said, my specific knowledge in this area is the effect of EI with respect to maternity and parental leave.