Public child care is expected to assist families in reconciling work with family life. Yet, empirical evidence for the relevance of public child care to maternal employment is inconclusive. We exploit the introduction of a legal claim to a place in kindergarten in Germany, which was contingent...

In this paper, we investigate whether the expansion of childcare leads to an increase in the female labour supply. We measure female labour supply at both the extensive and intensive margin. For identification, we exploit a nationwide reform that expanded childcare for 1–2- year-olds in...

We study the impact of grandparental retirement decisions on family members' labor supply and child outcomes by exploiting a Dutch pension reform in a fuzzy Regression Discontinuity design. A one-hour increase in grandmothers' hours worked causes adult daughters with young children to work half...

As women increasingly entered the labor force throughout the late 20th century, the challenges of balancing work and family came to the forefront. We leverage pronounced changes in the availability of public schooling for young children—through duration expansions to the kindergarten day—to...

This paper argues that the pace to return to work after childbirth is not independent of family values. I evaluate the effect of a parental leave policy reform in Germany in 2007-aimed at incentivizing an earlier return to work - on the return to work of mothers who hold different family values....

In this paper, we provide estimates of the subjectively perceived cost of children depending on the extent of parental time restrictions. Building on a study by Koulovatianos et al. (2009) that introduces a novel way of using subjective income evaluation data for such estimations, we conduct a...

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...

We use French household data to estimate a structural model of female labor supply and use of paid child care outside the home. Child care costs are found to have little impact on the labor market participation decision of mothers. The model is used to study various policy issues. The influence...

Does after-school care provision promote mothers ́employment and balance the allocation of paid work among parents of schoolchildren? We address this question by exploiting variation in cantonal (state) regulations of after-school care provision in Switzerland. To establish exogeneity of...

Norwegian parents of preschool children make their care choices from a completely different choice set compared to what their predecessor did, say, two decades ago. Now, there is essentially only one type of nonparental care, center-based care, and at the parental side fathers take a more...