The United States is the only industrialized nation that has elected not to have a national paid parental leave program. States are beginning to offer this benefit, and policy debates often center on the maximum number of weeks of paid leave to support, the income replacement rate, and how to fund what is most often a social insurance program. Looking to international precedents, this dissertation uses fixed effect probit and tobit regression analysis to examine how uptake of paid leave varies by family characteristics and according to national policy parameters. Household-level data from 20 European countries between 1967 and 2004 are drawn from the Luxembourg Income Study. Results indicate that policies that have a shorter maximum benefit period and longer tenure of required contributions to establish benefit eligibility have the highest uptake rates. Additionally, within the framework of generous European leave programs that boast wage replacement rates ranging from 60 to 100%, higher wage subsidy rates do not encourage additional uptake. In addition to international experiences with federally-operated paid parental leave programs, some proportion of parents in the U.S. have access to paid leave through their employers and temporary disability insurance benefits. Using OLS regression analysis, potential impacts of paid leave on maternal depression, child care arrangements, breastfeeding, child health, and child development (at nine-months old) are explored. The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort supplies data on 14,000 U.S. families with a child born in 2001. In addition, this dissertation uses Monte Carlo simulation to estimate the cost and necessary payroll tax rate to fund parental leave benefits at the state or federal level. The simulations vary the benefit period length, wage subsidy level, and weekly subsidy cap to generate a comprehensive set of cost estimates. Data from the 2006 March Current Population Survey (CPS) and from the Early Childhood National Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) are used to estimate input distributions for male and female wages and male and female demand for paid leave. These results can be used by state and federal policymakers developing or adjusting paid leave policies.