Childcare subsidies and labour supply — Evidence from a large Dutch reform

Leon J.H. Bettendorf, Egbert L.W. Jongen and Paul Muller

Labour Economics, 2015, vol. 36, issue C, 112-123

Abstract: After the introduction of the Law on Childcare in 2005, childcare subsidies in the Netherlands became much more generous. Public spending on childcare increased from 1 to 3 billion euro over the period 2004–2009. Using a differences-in-differences strategy we find that, despite the substantial budgetary outlay, this reform had only a modest impact on employment. Furthermore, the rather small effects we find are likely confounded by a coincident increase in the EITC for parents with young children of 0.6 billion euro, which presumably also served to increase the labour supply of the group. The joint reform increased the maternal employment rate by 2.3 percentage points (3.0%) and maternal hours worked by 1.1h per week (6.2%). The results further suggest that the reform slightly reduced hours worked by fathers.

Keywords: Childcare subsidies; Labour force participation; Differences-in-differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 H40 J13 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (87)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927537115000330
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Childcare subsidies and labour supply: evidence from a large Dutch reform (2012)
Working Paper: Childcare Subsidies and Labor Supply: Evidence from a large Dutch Reform (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:labeco:v:36:y:2015:i:c:p:112-123

DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2015.03.007

Access Statistics for this article

Labour Economics is currently edited by A. Ichino

More articles in Labour Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().