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...

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...

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...

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...

This paper considers the female labor force participation (FLFP) behavior over the past decade in five MENA countries namely, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and Tunisia. Low FLFP rates in these countries, as it is in other MENA countries, are well documented. We conduct synthetic panel...

Using over 50 thousand time-use diaries from two cohorts of children, we document significant gender differences in time allocation in the first 16 years in life. Relative to males, females spend more time on personal care, chores and educational activities and less time on physical and media...

The availability of child-care services has often been advocated as one of the instruments to counter the fertility decline observed in many high-income countries. In the recent past large inflows of lowskilled migrants have substantially increased the supply of child-care services. In this...

This paper investigates the impact of attending early childcare on the quality of parent–child interactions and children's cognitive outcomes. My identification strategy exploits geographical differences in terms of exposure to the program, controlling for the period when the program is...