There is a vast empirical literature investigating the effects of child care costs on female employment. Day care costs are usually treated as a reduction in female wages, which is supposed to negatively affect a woman's propensity to participate in the labor market. In this paper, we argue that...

In this paper, we take a multilevel perspective to investigate the role of child care in the transition to motherhood in Germany. We argue that in the European institutional context the availability of public day care and informal child care arrangements should be a central element of the local...