Does Paid Family Leave Reduce Nursing Home Use? The California Experience

Abstract

The intent of Paid Family Leave (PFL) is to make it financially easier for individuals to take time off from paid work to care for children and seriously ill family members. Given the linkages between care provided by family members and the usage of paid services, we examine whether California's PFL program influenced nursing home utilization in California during the 1999 to 2008 period. This is the first empirical study to examine the effects of PFL on long-term care patterns. Multivariate difference-indifference estimates across alternative comparison groups provide consistent evidence that the implementation of PFL reduced the proportion of the elderly population in nursing homes by 0.5 to 0.7 percentage points. Our preferred estimate, employing an empirically-matched group of control states, finds that PFL reduced nursing home usage by about 0.65 percentage points. For California, this represents an 11 percent relative decline in elderly nursing home utilization.