We study the short, medium, and long run employment effects of a substantial change in the parental leave benefit program in Germany. In 2007, a means-tested parental leave transfer program, which had paid benefits for up to two years, was replaced by an earnings related transfer, which paid...

This paper evaluates how access to paid parental leave affects labor market entrance for immigrating mothers with small children. Paid parental leave together with job protection may increase labor force participation among women but if it is too generous it may create incentives to stay out of...

Supporting working mothers to balance their work and childcare responsibilities is a central objective of maternal and parental leave policies. Nearly all countries offer some forms of maternity and family leave programs for childbearing on a national basis. This chapter reviews various types of...

Little literature currently exists on the effects of childcare use on maternal labor market outcomes in a developing country context, and recent studies offer mixed results. We attempt to fill these gaps by analyzing several of the latest rounds of the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey...

Although a large body of literature has argued that motherhood has a profound and long-lasting negative effect on the employment and earnings of women, there is little evidence focusing on the post-communist region. This paper exploits the latest round of the EBRD-World Bank Life in Transition...

Ample empirical evidence has found that access to childcare for preschool children increases mothers' labor force participation and employment. In this paper, we investigate whether increased childcare for primary school children improves the quality of jobs mothers find by estimating the causal...

This paper contributes to the debate on the revision of the Barcelona targets on childcare, as promoted by the European Commission in 2022, that aims to provide childcare for children below the age of 3. Using EUROLAB, a structural model of labour supply that can also accounts for labour demand...

Women face unique challenges in starting and running their own businesses and may have differing motives to men for pursuing self-employment. Previous research suggests that married women with families value the flexibility that self-employment can offer, allowing them to balance their family...

A number of studies have shown that women’s and men’s wages relate to parenthood in general and to parental leave in particular, but we know little about the possible wage impact of leave to care for sick children, which is a part of the Swedish parental leave system. On the one hand, care...

We analyze how access to childcare affects the health outcomes of children with unemployed parents using a reform that increased childcare access in some Swedish municipalities. While we find no effects of childcare access on hospitalization for 2- to 3-year-olds, our results suggest that 4- to...