Women's labor force participation has rapidly increased in most countries, but mothers still struggle to achieve a satisfactory work-life balance. Childcare allows the primary caregiver, usually the mother, to take time away from childrearing for employment. Family policies that subsidize...

Work and family life arrangements differed greatly between the east and west before German reunification in 1990. Since reunification, however, the employment rates of mothers with children requiring childcare have converged. This trend is accompanied by a growing approval of maternal...

Grandparents, and in particular grandmothers, are an important source of informal child care for their grandchildren in most developed countries. The literature shows how these informal transfers of care can help promote female labor participation. However, less is known about how working-age...

This paper examines the effect of an expansion of subsidized early child care on maternal labor market outcomes. It contributes to the literature by analyzing, apart from the employment rate, the adjustment of agreed working hours and especially of preferred working hours. Semi-parametric...

Parental leave and child care are important instruments of family policies to improve work– family balance. This paper studies the impact of the substantial change in Germany’s parental leave system on maternal employment. The aim of the reform was to decrease birth-related maternal...

There are considerable differences in gender unemployment gaps across the EU. We use labor force survey data on 21 countries to perform a series of data decompositions and show that the cross-country variation in gender unemployment gaps is primarily driven by the differences in female labor...

In 1933, the German government introduced the marriage loan for newlyweds, a policy aimed at increasing marriages and births as well as male employment, which entailed a work ban for the wife and sizeable credit deductions for children. This paper illustrates that the policy was rather...