Maternity rights and mothers' return to work

This paper uses a cohort of 12,000 births to examine the effect of maternityrights on mothers' post-birth return to employment decisions. It uses a discrete hazard model to disentangle the effects of the terms of maternityrights entitlements from other factors that influence the timing of a mother's return to work. Mothers with rights have an underlying (but unobserved) stronger attachment to the labour market that prompts earlier return than on average. We take this into account by estimating a counterfactual distribution of return times using a sample of women who failed to qualify for maternityrights but who have similar levels of labour market attachment. Even when differential attachment is taken into account there remains a substantial impact of maternityrights on behaviour.