Born on the first of April: the changes in the birth grant and its effect on the duration of the pregnancy

ABSTRACT

On the 1st of April 2006, an amendment to the Act on State Social Support came into force in the Czech Republic. This amendment more than doubled the value of the one-off birth grant. The increase was announced less than nine months ahead of implementation and only mothers from low-income households were eligible. We explored whether the change of the birth grant provided enough financial incentive to affect the timing of childbirths. We utilized time fixed-effects regression models to capture the effect of the intervention on the number of births using an official dataset which covers daily births between the years of 2000 and 2018. The 1st of April saw the largest value of the adjusted relative number of births for the entire year 2006 and our findings show that between 100 and 244 births were postponed to the first week of April. We found evidence that part of the shift was caused by postponing C-section deliveries, which were overrepresented in the first week of April, and accounted for 40% of the birth-shifts.

KEYWORDS:

• J13: Fertility
• timing births
• birth grant
• pro-natal policy
• Czech Republic
• J38: Public Policy

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was based on a thesis by Marek Pazitka. However, this version has been largely reworked without his participation; we are very grateful for his previous work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.