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...

This Brief explores how childcare responsibilities shape women’s entrepreneurial choices and business growth, drawing on data from the Women, Business and the Law project as well as complementary evidence from Bangladesh, Brazil, and Nigeria. Globally, women spend nearly three times as much...

Reducing poverty is a central policy priority in many countries, also in wealthy countries with comprehensive universal support systems, such as the Nordic welfare states. This study examines policy options designed to support families with preschool-aged children and their implications for...

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...

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...

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...

Early childhood programmes frequently lose effectiveness at scale, yet the role of the workforce remains poorly understood. We document substantial heterogeneity in workforce effectiveness in England's national home-visiting programme for first-time teenage mothers, despite a highly-structured...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Many advanced economies face persistently low fertility alongside rapid population ageing, raising concerns about economic sustainability and demographic balance. Addressing these challenges requires both sustained labor market participation among the workingage population and conditions that...

Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) encompasses publicly regulated services that provide education and childcare for children from birth until the start of primary education. ECEC plays a critical role in fostering children’s cognitive, social, and emotional development, enhancing school...

Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) refers to publicly regulated services that provide education and childcare for children from birth until the start of primary education. ECEC delivers wide‑ranging benefits, including improved cognitive and social development, enhanced school...

This article presents an evaluation of Mate Raymi, an educational program designed to strengthen mathematical and ethnomathematical skills among preschool children in Peru. Implemented through audio lessons and complemented with contextualized materials, teacher training, and pedagogical...

We study the long-run effects of a large public expansion of pre-primary education in Argentina. Between 1993 and 1999, the federal government financed the construction of new preschool classrooms targeted to departments with low baseline enrollment and high poverty, creating roughly 186,000...

Early childhood programmes frequently lose effectiveness at scale, yet the role of the workforce remains poorly understood. We document substantial heterogeneity in workforce effectiveness in England's national home-visiting programme for first-time teenage mothers, despite a highly-structured...

This paper investigates how tightening work requirements in subsidized child care affects parental employment. Using Dutch administrative data, we examine a 2012 reform that capped subsidized child care hours at 140% of the hours worked by the lesser-working parent. We identify affected...

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 2002, Sweden reformed its parental leave system by adding a second "daddy month," i.e., a second month of pay-related parental leave reserved exclusively for each parent. In addition to giving fathers an economic incentive to take more leave, this change had an effect on cultural norms. We...

Over the last 70 years, there has been a dramatic increase in female labor supply. However, gender gaps in employment trajectories remain, in part because the role of childrearing has largely fallen upon women. Providing more publicly funded childcare could relax these constraints, which may...

This research estimates by how much the NCS reduces childcare costs for families who use formal childcare in Ireland. The cost 'coverage' of the subsidy, measured by the ratio of the subsidy to the total cost of care, is estimated using the microsimulation model, SWITCH, linked to 2022 data from...

Early childhood is a crucial period for skills development and socio-emotional growth. Forcibly displaced children experience significant trauma, necessitating effective interventions. This paper examines the effect of Early Childhood Development (ECD) programs on the psychosocial and...

This note provides guidance for policymakers, World Bank country teams, and development practitioners to enhance the quality, affordability, and sustainability of home-based childcare (HBC) services in low-income settings. It outlines a comprehensive approach to recognizing HBC as a public good...

The composition and quality of the child care workforce may be uniquely sensitive to changes in the complementarities between home production and market work. This paper examines whether the expansion of oral contraceptives and abortion access throughout the 1960's and 1970's influenced the...

This study investigates whether (and how) working from home (WFH) affects the gender division of parental unpaid labor. I use the recent COVID-19 pandemic that brought an unanticipated yet lasting shift to WFH combined with a measure of occupational WFH feasibility (Alipour et al. 2023) as a...

This infographic depicts the main findings of the report Key data on early childhood education and care in Europe 2025. The findings are based on analysis of policies in 37 European countries (39 education systems). The report covers the EU 27 Member States and Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina,...

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is a basic right for all children and a foundation for lifelong learning. It plays a critical role in reducing inequalities and enhancing women's participation in the workforce. This third edition of Key data on early childhood education and care in...

Fachkräftemangel, Demokratiegefährdung, alternde Bevölkerung, digitale Transformation, Migration - die Gesellschaft verändert sich rasant, die politischen Rahmenbedingungen für gute Bildung aber bisweilen nur langsam. In dieser dynamischen Umgebung wird Lernen zum lebenslangen Thema, was...