Centrebased childcare is seen as a public investment to facilitate maternalemployment. Recent theoretical research proposes that such investmentspotentially lead to substantial gains in child development and thus to high returnsfor society as a whole. However, the empirical evidence is still...

In many developed countries a decline in fertility has occurred. This development has been attributed to greater education of women. However, establishing a causal link is difficult as both fertility and education have changed secularly. The contribution of this paper is to study the connection...

This paper provides a new explanation for the narrowing and reversal of the gender education gap. It highlights the indirect effect of returns to human capital on parents' preferences for sons and the resulting demand for children and education. We assume that parents maximize the full income of...

In this paper we analyse the correlation between the level of education and the number of children in Italy. We select 10,720 Italian families from the 2004-2007 European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) dataset. Our dependent variable is represented by the number of...

This paper investigates the role of women’s education in the transition towards having a second child in Italy by using the Longitudinal Investigation on Italian Families (ILFI). By implementing a simple event-history model, we find a negative effect of women’s education on the transition...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between education and completed fertility decisions at couple level for some EU countries. For this purpose we control for demographic, social and economic conditions, by using the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) dataset. In order to handle...

In this paper we have investigated the impact of the level of education on the number of children in Italy. We have selected 1,490 families from the 1997- 2005 Longitudinal Investigation on Italian Families (ILFI) dataset. Our dependent variable is represented by the number of children ever born...

This paper presents results from a randomized evaluation of a home visiting program for disadvantaged first-time mothers and their families implemented in three German federal states. I analysis the impact of the intervention on maternal employment, school attendance, child care use, fertility,...

This paper investigates the role of women’s education in the transition towards having a second child in Italy by using the Longitudinal Investigation on Italian Families (ILFI). By implementing a simple event-history model, we find a negative effect of women’s education on the transition...

This paper presents the results of a randomized study of a home visiting program implemented in Germany for low-income, first-time mothers. A major goal of the program is to improve the participants' economic self-sufficiency and family planning. I use administrative data from the German social...