Replication data for "The Adoption of Paid Sick Leave in US States"

Paid sick leave, or the ability to remain home from work in the event of illness and receive compensation, has risen in prominence after the COVID-19 pandemic. Among OECD countries, all but two, the United States and South Korea, have national paid sick leave (PSL) policies. Yet despite federal inaction in the US, states have been adopting PSL, with 15 plus DC having done so by the end of 2020. In the absence of federal policy, what drives states to adopt paid sick leave mandates? In this paper, we investigate two possible explanations - women in politics and jurisdictional competition. In the former, we suggest that increases in female representation in state-level governance make it more likely that a state will adopt a paid sick leave policy. In the latter explanation, we suggest that jurisdictional competition in the form of cities or counties adopting municipal paid sick leave policies creates pressure on the state-level government to enact state-wide policies to harmonize policy, in a process of “bottom-up” federalism. To evaluate our hypotheses, we create a dataset of all state and municipal PSL policies in the United States. We find strong support for the gender representation argument, but not for the jurisdictional competition argument.