Viet Nam’s investment in its youngest generation is fundamentally an investment in the country’s future human capital. Today, over 10 million Vietnamese children under age 6 (with another one million expected in the next five years) will reach working age by 2040. This cohort is projected to...

This study evaluates the impact of Malta's 2014 childcare reform, a universal Free Childcare Scheme for children aged 3 months to 3 years, on female employment. Using a difference-in-differences (DD) framework and matched DD models, I find that the reform may have increased the probability of...

The Head Start program, launched in 1965 and targeted to children from disadvantaged backgrounds, remains the largest early childhood care and education (ECE) program in the United States and the only one deployed at the federal level. As such, the Head Start literature spans several decades and...

Women's employment remains highly sensitive to childcare constraints, making childcare availability a critical lever for supporting mothers' labor force attachment. We study the effects of expanded full-day programming in Head Start, using the 2016 federal funding initiative that targeted...

I develop and estimate a life-cycle discrete-choice model of fertility and female labor supply to study the optimal design of a range of child-related policies. First, I examine two German reforms that introduced wage-contingent parental leave payments and expanded access to low-cost public...

In tight labour markets, where employers compete not only on wages but also on amenities such as job family friendliness, employer-provided childcare arrangements serve as a powerful tool to attract and retain working parents. Yet little causal evidence exists on how employees evaluate such...

This paper investigates the labour market consequences of motherhood in Italy, with a focus on how institutional and local contexts shape the child penalty. Using administrative data from the Italian National Social Security Institute (INPS), we track the labour market trajectories of mothers in...

Ab dem Schuljahr 2029/2030 wird dieser dann in allen Jahrgangsstufen der Grundschulen gelten. Sämtliche ostdeutschen Länder und Hamburg werden diesen ohne weiteren Ausbau ihrer Betreuungsinfrastrukturen erfüllen können. Zwar gibt es hier noch kleine Lücken zwischen den von den Eltern...

The Head Start program, launched in 1965 and targeted to children from disadvantaged backgrounds, remains the largest early childhood care and education (ECE) program in the United States and the only one deployed at the federal level. As such, the Head Start literature spans several decades and...

This paper provides large-scale evidence linking the economic effects of childcare programs to social skills measured in adulthood. We examine Finland's first national public childcare program, and document that it increased parental labor supply - through retirement - while reducing the...

This paper provides large-scale evidence linking the economic effects of childcare programs to social skills measured in adulthood. We examine Finland's first national public childcare program, and document that it increased parental labor supply -through retirement- while reducing the...

How shall publicly provided excludable goods be financed - by general taxation or user fees? The general conclusion of the existing literature is that exclusive tax financing is neither efficient nor desirable under widely shared distributive goals. A striking example is childcare because here...

Using Norwegian administrative register data, we show that having a lone parent in the terminal stage of life has a small negative effect on the offspring's labor supply, both at the extensive and the intensive margins. While the effects at the intensive margin are reversed after the parent's...

Currently, both men and women face the challenge of balancing their work and childcare responsibilities, which is not always straightforward. When individuals experience tensions between their work and family life, they are likely to prioritize one over the other, often facing penalties for...

We study the wage effects of an expansion of for-profit preschools in Sweden, which followed after a reform in 2006 removed municipalities' right to veto private entry. The expansion decreased preschool employers' monopsony power by increasing the number of alternative employers. We use a...

Objectives: The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of public childcare provision on women's and men's start-up rates in Germany. Going beyond previous studies, we also analyze its impact on the extent of the gender gap in start-up rates. Literature review: The current state of research...

Parental transfers of time, education, and money shape intergenerational mobility. Using panel data from birth to retirement, we estimate child skill production functions and embed them in a dynastic model of parental investment. We find that parental time investments have a dual purpose:...

Hatte die Zahl der unter Dreijährigen in institutioneller Betreuung im Jahr 2023 mit 857.000 ihren Höchststand erreicht, ist sie bis zum Jahr 2025 wieder um 56.000 oder 6,5 Prozent auf nur noch 801.000 gesunken. Niedriger lag sie letztmals im Jahr 2018. Ursächlich hierfür sind vorwiegend die...

Many existing approaches to screen time management rely on simplistic time limits or general warnings that fail to address the complex realities families face. Parents often turn to screens as practical solutions to everyday challenges-needing to complete tasks, manage difficult behaviors, or...

We provide the first causal evidence that changes to work arrangements – in the form of greater schedule regularity – can reduce the child penalty in earnings for women. The Australian 2009 Fair Work Act explicitly entitled parents of young children to request a change in work arrangements....

While democratization and enfranchisement are known to benefit minority groups in the long run, sudden increases in political representation can disrupt existing power balances, provoke resistance, and lead to worse policy outcomes in the short run. We document and explain this pattern. In our...