The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is one of the largest anti-poverty programs in the United States, providing over $67 billion to more than 27 million families for the tax year 2016, an average of $2,455. By subsidizing the earnings of low-income workers, the EITC reduces poverty both directly...

We investigate the importance of subjective expectations of returns to and effort costs of the two main investments that mothers make in newborns: breastfeeding and stimulation. We find heterogeneity across mothers in expected effort costs and expected returns for outcomes in the cognitive,...

Background: Home visiting programs constitute an important policy to support vulnerable families with young children. They mainly aim to improve infant-parent relationships, however evidence on their effectiveness based on observational measures is relatively scarce. The present study provides...

We examine how the effects of incentivizing individuals to use healthcare depend on the capacity of the health system. We study a conditional cash transfer program (JSY) in India that paid women to give birth in medical facilities. We find that JSY doubled the number of deliveries for which the...

This paper documents the evolving impact of childbearing on the work activity of mothers between 1787 and 2014. It is based on a compiled data set of 429 censuses and surveys, representing 101 countries and 46.9 million mothers, using the International and U.S. IPUMS, the North Atlantic...

This paper looks at the effects of tax-benefit systems and social stratification determinants on the probability of poverty among mothers after childbirth and divorce/separation. The analysis was carried out for twelve EU countries, which represent a variety of welfare regimes providing...

This paper investigates whether the effects of affordable and easily available public child care on fertility and maternal employment depend on the career costs of children a woman faces. It builds on the idea that these costs vary by occupation and education. In a generalized Diff-in-Diff, I...

While workplace flexibility is perceived to be a key determinant of maternal labor supply, less is known about fathers' demand for flexibility or about intra-household spillover effects of flexibility initiatives. This paper examines these issues in the context of a critical period in family...

In this study we examine the passage of a reform to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures in Sweden in 2003. Following publication of medical evidence showing that pregnancy success rates could be maintained using single rather than multiple embryo transfers, the single embryo transfer (SET)...

While workplace flexibility is perceived to be a key determinant of maternal labor supply, less is known about fathers' demand for flexibility or about intra-household spillover effects of flexibility initiatives. This paper examines these issues in the context of a critical period in family...

We explore the effects of a child labor regulation that changed the legal working age from 14 to 16 over the health of their offspring. We show that the reform was detrimental for the health of the son's of affected parents at delivery. Yet, in the medium run, the effects of the reform are...

This paper examines the effect of an expansion of subsidized early child care on maternal labor market outcomes. It contributes to the literature by analyzing, apart from the employment rate and agreed working hours, preferred working hours. Using the legal claim for subsidized child care...

Women face unique challenges in starting and running their own businesses and may have differing motives to men for pursuing self-employment. Previous research suggests that married women with families value the flexibility that self-employment can offer, allowing them to balance their family...

We estimate the causal effect of maternal education on the mental health of mother's children in late adolescence and adulthood. Theoretical considerations are ambiguous about a causal effect of maternal education on children's mental health. To identify the causal effect of maternal education,...

Temporary school closures (TSC) represent a major challenge to policymakers across the globe due to their potential impact on instructional time and student achievement. A neglected but equally important question relates to how such closures affect the labor market behavior of parents. This...

We use temperature variation within narrowly-defined geographic and demographic cells to show that prenatal exposure to extreme heat increases the risk of maternal hospitalization during pregnancy, and that this effect is larger for black than for white mothers. At childbirth, heat-exposed...

While Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) expansions are typically associated with improvements in maternal mental health, little is known about the mechanisms through which the program affects this outcome. The EITC could affect mental health through direct tax credit, changes in labor supply and...

Die Lohnungleichheit zwischen Frauen und Männern ist ein wesentliches Hindernis auf dem Weg zu Geschlechtergleichstellung. Löhne sind für die Lebensqualität und soziale Teilhabe entscheidend und bestimmen, wie gut Individuen abgesichert und im Alter versorgt sind. Die Beseitigung der...

We construct and estimate a model of child development in which both the parents and children make investments in the child's skill development. In each period of the development process, partially altruistic parents act as the Stackelberg leader and the child the follower when setting her own...

We use a unique data set of linked birth records from Florida to analyze the intergenerational transmission of health at birth by parental gender. We show that both paternal and maternal birth weights significantly predict the child's birth weight even after accounting for all genetic and...

We investigate universalization of access to health in Brazil. We find large reductions in maternal, foetal, neonatal and post-neonatal mortality, a reduction in fertility and, possibly on account of selection, no change in the quality of births. Using rich administrative data, we investigate...

The introduction of the Australian Paid Parental Leave scheme in 2011 provides a rare opportunity to estimate the labour supply and employment impacts of publicly-funded paid leave on mothers in the first year post-partum. The almost universal coverage of the scheme coupled with detailed survey...

Maternity leave policies are presumed to be essential to ensure the health of pregnant workers and their unborn children. However, little is known about the optimal duration of prenatal maternity leave and existing policies are not evidence-based. We evaluate a substantial maternity leave...

We compare employment rates of mothers and childless women over the life course across the birth cohorts from 1940 to 1979 in Austria. By following synthetic cohorts of mothers and childless women up to retirement age, we are able to study both short-term and long-term consequences of having a...

Background and Objective: The studies measured Out-of-Pocket Expenditure (OOPE) for hospital births previously suffer from serious data limitations. To overcome such limitations, we designed a hospital-based study for measuring the levels and factors of OOPE on maternity care for hospital births...