We explore how access to Head Start impacts maternal labor supply. By relaxing child care constraints, public preschool options like Head Start might lead mothers to reallocate time between employment, child care, and other activities. Using the 1990s enrollment and funding expansions and the...

Three states (Georgia, Oklahoma and Florida) recently introduced Universal Pre-Kindergarten (Universal Pre-K) programs offering free preschool to all age-eligible children, and policy makers in many other states are promoting similar policies. How do such policies affect the participation of...

We assess the effects of a Conditional Cash Transfer program on adult labor supply in Peru. The program, named Juntos, lacks an experimental design so we rely on a sort of “natural experiment”. Instead of comparing treated and non-treated households, our strategy exploits within-municipality...

To our knowledge, this paper provides the first study evaluating the effects of higher education for adults on the timing of retirement. Using detailed longitudinal population register data 1982–2010, we track first-time enrollees in higher education in 1992–1993. Our sample is aged 42–55...

Reconciling work and family is high on many governments' agenda, especially in countries, such as Spain, with record-low fertility and female labor force participation rates. This paper analyzes the effects of a large-scale provision of publicly subsidized child care in Spain in the early 1990s,...

Reconciling work and family is high on many governments' agenda, especially in countries, such as Spain, with record-low fertility and female labor force participation rates. This paper analyzes the effects of a large-scale provision of publicly subsidized child care in Spain in the early 1990s,...

We study the impact of child care for toddlers on the labor supply of mothers and fathers in Norway. For identification, we exploit the staggered expansion across municipalities following a large reform from 2002. Our IV-estimates indicate that child care use causes an increase in the labor...

We provide causal evidence that children's school schedules contribute to the persistence of the gender pay gap between parents. Historically, French children have had no school on Wednesdays. In 2013, a reform reallocated some classes to Wednesday mornings. Exploiting variations in the...

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...

We study the impact of child care for toddlers on the labor supply of mothers and fathers in Norway. For identification, we exploit the staggered expansion across municipalities following a large reform from 2002. Our IV-estimates indicate that child care use causes an increase in the labor...