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KDI 경제교육·정보센터

ENG
  • 경제배움
  • Economic

    Information

    and Education

    Center

최신자료
The Benefits and Costs of Paid Family Leave
NBER
2024.12.26
National paid family leave programs have been repeatedly proposed in the United States in recent years. To inform policy discussions, we provide a benefit-cost analysis of introducing such a program. We systematically identify high-quality, quasi-experimental studies on the impact of paid leave on infants and parents. Using the most conservative estimates or the mean estimates from this literature, we estimate that every $1,000 investment in paid parental leave would generate, respectively, $7,275 or $29,406 in present discounted net social benefits. We use these estimates to conduct a microsimulation of benefits and costs of two policy proposals with different eligibility and wage replacement rates. The first, a 4-week program, would have an initial fiscal cost of under $2 billion and net social benefits of $13 (conservative) or $55 billion (mean). The corresponding figures for the 12-week program are about 3.7 times larger, suggesting that either version would likely generate high returns.