This paper estimates the effect of childcare availability on parents' employment probability using the timing of death … mechanisms. Through their impact on childcare availability, grandmothers' deaths reduce mothers' employment rate by 12 percentage … points (27 percent) and do not affect fathers' employment rate. The negative effect on mothers' employment is smaller where …

The Hodrick-Prescott filter is a popular tool in macroeconomics for decomposing a time series into a smooth trend and a … regulations and policy changes generally lead to similar behaviours. Thus, those events should be absorbed by the trend component … of the trend-cycle decomposition, but the Hodrick-Prescott filter does not allow for jumps. We propose a modification of …

on parental employment and wages, child care choices, child development, and center quality. We use our estimates to …