The Czech Republic is a country with a strong attachment of women to the labor market, but with one of the longest paid family leaves, which is often followed by a spell of unemployment. Using a difference-in-differences methodology, we study the impact of two reforms of the duration of the...

Maternity and family leave policies enable mothers to take time off work to prepare for and recover from childbirth and to care for their new children. While there is substantial variation in the details of these policies around the world, the existing research yields the following general...

Labor market policies for expecting and new mothers emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century. The main motivation for these policies was to ensure the health of mothers and their newborn children. With increased female labor market participation, the focus has gradually shifted to the...

This article provides an analysis of the impact of the Qu'ebec Parental Insurance Plan (QPIP). Using a quasi-experimental design with survey data, we find that mothers spent on average 10 additional days with their newborn following the implementation of the insurance plan, and that both...

Supporting working mothers to balance their work and childcare responsibilities is a central objective of maternal and parental leave policies. Nearly all countries offer some forms of maternity and family leave programs for childbearing on a national basis. This chapter reviews various types of...

Increasing mothers’ labor supply is a key policy challenge in many OECD countries. Germany recently introduced a generous parental benefit that allows for strong consumption smoothing after childbirth and, by taking into account opportunity costs of childbearing, incentivizes working women to...

In 2007, seeking to increase female labor force participation and more generally ease burdens on working women, the Mexican government introduced an enormous expansion of a child care program: Estancias Infantiles para Apoyar a Madres Trabajadoras (EI). EI covers 90 percent approximately of the...

Increasing mothers' labor supply is a key policy challenge in many OECD countries. Germany recently introduced a generous parental benefit that allows for strong consumption smoothing after childbirth and, by taking into account opportunity costs of childbearing, incentivizes working women to...

Elisabeth Grewenig prepared this study while she was working at the Center for Economics of Education at the ifo Institute. The study was completed in March 2021 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the LMU Munich. It consists of five distinct empirical essays that...

Previous studies report a range of estimates for the response of female labor supply and childcare attendance to childcare prices. We shed new light on these questions using a policy reform that raises the price of public daycare. After the reform, children are 8 percentage points less likely to...