Does paid sick leave encourage staying at home? Evidence from the United States during a pandemic

Abstract

We study the impact of a temporary U.S. paid sick leave mandate that became effective April 1st, 2020 on self‐quarantining, proxied by physical mobility behaviors gleaned from cellular devices. We study this policy using generalized difference‐in‐differences methods, leveraging pre‐policy county‐level heterogeneity in the share of workers likely eligible for paid sick leave benefits. We find that the policy leads to increased self‐quarantining as proxied by staying home. We also find that COVID‐19 confirmed cases decline post‐policy.

A literature review of the economics of COVID‐19

“…M. Andersen et al. (2020) find that temporary paid sick leave, a federal mandate enacted in the United States, which allowed private and public employees 2 weeks of paid leave, led to increased compliance with stay‐at‐home orders. On a more global scale, Hsiang et al.…”

State paid sick leave mandates associated with increased mental health disorder prescriptions among Medicaid enrollees

“…We also implemented a range of robustness checks to assess whether results are driven by the specification and sample selected. Specifically, we (1) excluded time-varying covariates; (2) included US Census division-by-year fixed-effects rather than year fixed-effects; (3) controlled for the state unemployment rate among nonelderly adults 32 and mental health outcomes among adults aged 18 years and older 36 ; (4) did not lag the PSL mandate 1 year; (5) controlled for a bordering a state with a PSL mandate; (6) dropped first Maryland and Virginia, and then Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York given substantial numbers of people working and residing in different states in these 2 areas; (7) replaced the PSL indicator with an indicator taking on a value of 1 if a state has a PSL mandate or a paid-time-off mandate; (8) estimated unweighted regression; (9) dropped 2020 (the first pandemic year; in this year there were large-scale employment losses, which may impact access to PSL through state mandates and there was a federal PSL mandate in place 37 ); (10) dropped states that adopted a PSL after 2019 as we have few post-treatment years for these states; (11) dropped years prior to 2014 (ie, pre-ACA Medicaid expansion) and dropped state/year pairs 2014–2022 in which ACA Medicaid expansion was not in place to generate a potentially more suitable comparison group (this exclusion led us to drop over half the sample); (12) included DC; (13) used an estimator proposed by Gardner 38 that is robust to potential bias from dynamic and heterogeneous treatment effects when using DID regressions with a staggered policy roll-out (we excluded Connecticut from this analysis as we had a single pretreatment year for that state [which adopted a PSL mandate in 2012] and as we lagged the PSL mandate 1 year and thus have no pretreatment data to estimate a fixed-effects parameter for this state) and conducted a diagnostic test to assess the importance of these biases 25 ; and (14) imputed suppressed data points in the SDUD with 0 (smallest possible value) or 10 (largest possible value).…”

The effects of contemporaneous air pollution on COVID-19 morbidity and mortality

“… Allcott et al (2020) , Andersen et al (2023) , CDC (2021a) , CDC (2021b) , Ingram and Franco (2014) , McCormack et al (2020) , MIT Election Data And Science Lab (2021) , Mohamed et al (2020) …”