The Effects of Employment while Pregnant on Health at Birth

Today, many pregnant women take a brief period of time off from work to give birth. In this paper, I identify the effects of pregnancy employment on health at birth. My initial results show that pregnancy employment has beneficial effects. However, these effects often become statistically insignificant when I control for earnings from pregnancy employment, when I exclusively examine women employed prior to the pregnancy, and when I examine siblings in fixed effects models. I conclude that beneficial effects of pregnancy employment are partially due to increased family income via earnings during the pregnancy and partially due to unobserved heterogeneity. There is no evidence that increased female labor force participation adversely affects health at birth.