Supporting caregiving and parental work in the period surrounding childbirth are complex challenges that have faced policymakers in many countries since the widespread entrance of mothers into the labor market in the 1960s and 1970s. Scholars and advocates suggest paid leave policies have the potential to make progress toward these goals. In the US, interest in paid leave among policy makers, advocates and researchers is growing. Five states currently provide paid leave around the birth of a child through Temporary Disability Insurance (TDI) programs and/or Paid Family Leave (PFL) programs, and the President’s current budget allots resources to encourage other states to adopt similar programs. State-provided paid leave may be especially important for low-income new parents who are less likely to have employer provided-leave or be covered by the FMLA due to firm size and hourly requirements. Despite this growing interest in paid leave, research remains limited, particularly on how these policies matter for disadvantaged new-parent families, who may rely on means-tested support during leave-times to make ends meet. This panel brings together new research from a variety of disciplinary perspectives working to fill this gap. Drawing on diverse data sources and methodological approaches these papers explore how state-provided paid leave programs shape child health and birth outcomes; parents’ leave taking and mothers’ employment decisions around birth; and low-income families’ experiences of material hardship in the year following a birth. Each paper pays particular attention to how these policies matter for disadvantaged new parent families and three papers explore how state-provided paid leave interacts with means-tested programs (SNAP, Medicaid, WIC and TANF) in the period surrounding childbirth. Including four papers provides audience members a comprehensive sense of the research and scholars active in this budding area of policy analysis. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1997, the first paper looks at how access to PFL and/or TDI shapes new parents’ use of leave and participation in public programs. Findings suggest positive effects on leave taking and negative effects on public program use, with particularly strong leave taking effects among fathers and low-income mothers. The second paper uses natality data and a difference-in-difference approach to estimate the impact of TDI programs on birth outcomes, showing positive effects on lowering state share of low birth weight infants, with the strongest effects for black mothers and unmarried mothers. The third paper focuses specifically on less-educated mothers and uses a difference-in-difference design and data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to show how state-level safety net programs and TDI/PFL shape the employment decisions of less-educated women in the period surrounding a birth. Using a sample of births between 1997-2012 in the SIPP data, the fourth paper explores the relationship between the generosity of state TANF programs, TDI/PFL availability and the likelihood of TANF use and experiences of material hardship among new-mother families.