Identifying the Effect of Temporal Work Flexibility on Parental Time with Children

It is recognized that employment policies must grant flexibility to the working schedules to allow parents to reconcile family and work. By exploiting the particularity of the East German labor market, I identify the causal effect of temporal work flexibility on parental time with children. The analysis unambiguously shows that it allows parents to spend about 30 percent more time with their children. The results can be generalized to Germany as a whole. It can be concluded that temporal work flexibility can be used as a device to mitigate the adverse effect of parental employment on the child’s cognitive development