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...

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...

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...

This paper investigates the impact of attending early childcare on second generation immigrant children's cognitive outcomes. Our analysis draws on administrative data on the entire population of students in fifth grade collected by the Italian Institute for the Evaluation of the Educational...

In this paper, we examine whether culture plays a role in the gender division of household labor. To explore this issue, we use data on early-arrival first and second generation immigrants living in the United States. Since all these individuals have grown up under the same laws, institutions,...

The explicit costs of raising a child have grown over the past several decades. Less well understood are the implicit costs of having a child, and how they have changed over time. In this paper we use longitudinal administrative data from over 70,000 individuals in the Synthetic SIPP Beta to...

Family structure is usually believed to affect children's human capital. Is it possible that causality goes in the opposite direction? This paper shows that the behavior of family structure variables over the life cycle dramatically changes when women have babies in their forties. These data...

Using a comprehensive individual panel dataset in China and an event study method, we examined the effects of having a child on gender inequality from the perspectives of labor market outcomes and its mechanisms. Results show that becoming a mother implies a sharp decline in labor earnings,...

How does childbirth impact the career paths of men and women within the same household? To what extent does the unpaid care work related to this event contribute to the downward mobility experienced by women in a highly flexible labour market like Italy? Drawing on feminist and labour market...