Restrictions on Reproductive Health Care and Women’s Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from the United States

Sammanfattning: This paper evaluates the impact of reproductive health care restrictions on women’s labor market outcomes in the United States. We exploit the variation in restrictions on reproductive health care services across U.S. states and over time by using individual level data on fertility and labor market outcomes and state level data on reproductive health care restrictions. We apply a difference-in-differences framework using two-way fixed effects and expect that restrictions on reproductive services affect labor market outcomes through their effect on fertility. First stage estimations suggest that being exposed to more restrictive reproductive services increases the fertility rate with 9.1 percent in general, and an increase of 10.3 percent for black women when estimating sub-group effects. We find no evidence of a general effect on employment or hours worked, but some evidence that black women are employed to a lesser extent than other women when they are exposed to more restrictive reproductive health care services.