Public child care and mothers’ career trajectories

Katrin Huber and Geske Rolvering ()
Additional contact information
Geske Rolvering: University of Passau

No 64, CEPA Discussion Papers from Center for Economic Policy Analysis

Abstract: This paper studies the effect of public child care on mothers’ career trajectories. To this end, we combine county-level data on child care coverage with detailed individual-level information from the German social security records and exploit a set of German reforms leading to a substantial temporal and spatial variation in child care coverage for children under the age of three. We conduct an event study approach that investigates the labor market outcomes of mothers in the years around the birth of their first child. We thereby explore career trajectories, both in terms of quantity and quality of employment. We find that public child care improves maternal labor supply in the years immediately following childbirth. However, the results on quality-related outcomes suggest that the effect of child care provision does not reach far beyond pure employment effects. These results do not change for mothers with different ‘career costs of children’.

Keywords: child care; maternal employment; career costs of children; women’s careers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J08 J13 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur, nep-hea and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.25932/publishup-58731 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Public Child Care and Mothers' Career Trajectories (2023)
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:pot:cepadp:64

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPA Discussion Papers from Center for Economic Policy Analysis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marco Winkler ().