With paid leave, older adults are spending less time looking after their grandchildren and more time looking after their parents.

In 2004, California passed a law requiring employers above a certain size to provide paid family leave to their employees.

Much of the research looking at this policy has examined its effect on the work, income and leave-taking of new parents and women of childbearing age—but less research has focused on how paid leave may affect older adults.

“The law could affect older adults directly, by enabling them to take paid leave to take care of sick relatives when they wouldn’t have before. But it could also affect older adults indirectly, if it enables new parents to take paid leave,” says University of Michigan economist Joelle Abramowitz.

“If grandparents provided significant amounts of care to their grandchildren because the parents of those grandchildren did not have access to paid leave, now that the parents of those grandchildren are able to take paid leave, we would expect to see grandparents spend less time caregiving to their grandchildren.”

The research team drew from the 1998-2016 waves of University of Michigan’s Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a longitudinal study of approximately 20,000 Americans over age 50 and their spouses. The study is nationally representative, and participants are interviewed every two years.

The HRS asks respondents with grandchildren if they or their spouses spent 100 or more hours in total taking care of their grandchildren in the past two years. If respondents answer yes, they are asked how many hours they spent taking care of grandchildren in the past two years and how many hours their spouse spent taking care of grandchildren in the past two years.

Likewise, the HRS asks respondents with parents if they or their spouses spent 100 or more hours in total helping their parents with basic personal activities in the past two years. If respondents answer yes, they are asked how many hours each they and their spouse spent helping their own parents and their spouse’s parents in the past two years. The researchers combined values for helping the respondent’s own parents and their spouse’s parents.

Additionally, the researchers were able to compare outcomes for residents of California to residents of other states using a restricted-use version of the data with state identifiers.

Read the full article about paid leave policies by Morgan Sherburne at Futurity.