In Germany, formal child care coverage rates have increased markedly over the past few decades. The present paper is concerned with how mothers’ mental and physical health is affected by whether they place their child in formal day care or not. Furthermore, the effects of formal child care...

In a model with endogenous fertility and labor supply three instruments of family policies are analyzed: child benefits, subsidies for external child care, and parental leave payments. We compare the impact on the quantity and quality of children, the secondary earner’s labor supply and...

This paper studies the effect of child care provision on family structure. We present a model of a marriage market with positive assortative matching, where in equilibrium the poorest women stay single. Couples have to decide on the number of children and spousal specialization in home...

In this paper we develop an overlapping generations model in which child care matters for human capital accumulation. We investigate whether an increase in labor supply brought about by a reduction in taxes is always associated with a reduction in parental time devoted to children, which...

Many countries are currently expanding access to child care for young children. But are all children equally likely to benefit from such expansions? We address this question by adopting a marginal treatment effects framework. We study the West German setting where high quality center-based care...

We apply German Mikrozensus data for the period 1996 to 2004 to investigate the employment status of mothers. Specifically, we ask whether there are behavioral differences between mothers in East and West Germany, whether these differences disappear over time, and whether there are differences...

Fertility and the provision of long-term care are connected by an aspect that has not received attention so far: both are time consuming activities that can be produced within the household or bought at the market and are, thus, connected through the intertemporal budget constraint of the...