Grandmothers’ availability for childcare has been shown to increase the labor force participation (LFP) and fertility of daughters. However, grandmothers’ childcare availability depends highly on their LFP. When grandmothers work, intergenerational income transfers to their daughters may...

In many parts of the developed world, governments devote a significant share of public funds to unconditional family cash transfers in an attempt to promote the economic well-being of households. But how successful are such policies? Germany has one of the world’s most generous child benefit...

In 1985, Gary Becker predicted employment and childcare sex gaps may ‘disappear or be greatly attenuated in the near future.’ In this article, I examine trends in the employment gap between mothers and fathers of young children over the last 40 years. I review theoretical explanations for...

Our study explores the impact of selection criteria on the costs and benefits of early childcare for mothers’ employment, child development, and municipalities’ revenues by exploiting the selection criteria of different Italian municipalities in assigning childcare slots. In Italy, only...

We apply a structural model of mothers’ labor supply and child care choices to evaluate the effects of two child care reforms in Germany that were introduced simultaneously. A legal claim to subsidized child care became effective for children aged 1 year or older. Moreover, a new child care...

This article 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 recent years, almost all children below school age in Western industrialized countries have some experience of attending day care institutions. However, the age at which children enter day care and therefore the overall time spent in day care varies substantially. We investigate the potential...

This paper is concerned with modelling household decisions and the welfare effects of tax policy. It seeks to emphasise the importance of a model that incorporates household production and can take account of the evident female labour supply heterogeneity across two-parent families. If, after...

Given that a child's birth and lifetime earning capacity are the result of actions undertaken by the child's own parents, if the government has an interest in the welfare or tax-paying capacity of its future citizens, it has no option but to condition the decisions of its present citizens....

The rising participation of women in paid work has not only heightened demand for universal early education and care programs but also led to increased use of childcare amongst children at earlier ages. Prior research investigating Quebec’s universal highly subsidized childcare documented...