Expanding public or publicly subsidized childcare has been a top social policy priority in many industrialized countries. It is supposed to increase fertility, promote children's development and enhance mothers' labor market attachment. In this paper, we analyze the causal effect of one of the...

This paper presents an empirical framework for the analysis of mothers' labor supply and child care choices, explicitly taking into account access restrictions to subsidized child care. This is particularly important for countries such as Germany, where subsidized child care is rationed and...

We analyse preferences for public, private or mixed provision of childcare theoretically and empirically. We model childcare as a publicly provided private good. Richer households should prefer private provision to either pure public or mixed provision. If public provision redistributes from...

Children with lower socioeconomic status (SES) tend to benefit more from early child care, but are substantially less likely to be enrolled. We study whether reducing behavioral barriers in the application process increases enrollment in child care for lower-SES children. In our RCT in Germany...

In this paper we develop a structural model of female employment and fertility which accounts for intertemporal feedback effects between the two outcomes. We identify the effect of financial incentives on the employment and fertility decision by exploiting variation in the tax and transfer...

We apply a structural model of mothers' labor supply and child care choices to evaluate the effects of two childcare reforms in Germany that were introduced simultaneously in August 2013. First, a legal claim to subsidized child care became effective for all children aged one year or older....