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...

The paper builds up a Harris-Todaro type general equilibrium model to examine the implications of a free education policy and liberalized trade policies on the child labour market. It shows that an increase in the subsidy on education and/or inflow of foreign capital may produce...

We investigate the importance of various mechanisms by which child care policies can affect life‐cycle patterns of employment and fertility among women, as well as long‐run cognitive outcomes among children. A dynamic structural model of employment, fertility, and child care use is estimated...

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...

As women increasingly entered the labor force throughout the late 20th century, the challenges of balancing work and family came to the forefront. We leverage pronounced changes in the availability of public schooling for young children—through duration expansions to the kindergarten day—to...

Most public expenditure on childcare in the US is made through a federal program, the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), established as part of landmark welfare reform legislation in 1996. The main goal of the reform was to increase employment and reduce welfare dependence among low-income...

Little is known about the response behavior of parents whose children are exposed to an early-life shock. In this paper we interpret the prenatal exposure of the Austrian 1986 cohort to radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident as a negative human capital shock and examine their parents...

In this paper, we investigate the response of female lone parents to two reforms to the welfare system in Australia. We look at changes to both hours and participation and focus on the channels of adjustment, in particular the role of job changes for adjustment in hours. We highlight the...

The paper describes to which extent European welfare states support an individual adult worker model and how the current policy should be assessed in terms of gender equality. Although a more individual design of welfare policies is clearly recognizable, the paper also illustrates the large gap...

In this paper, we investigate the response of female lone parents to two reforms to the welfare system in Australia. We look at changes to both hours and participation and focus on the channels of adjustment, in particular the role of job changes for adjustment in hours. We highlight the...