From homemakers to breadwinners? How mandatory kindergarten affects maternal labour market attachment

Selina Gangl and Martin Huber

VfS Annual Conference 2019 (Leipzig): 30 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall - Democracy and Market Economy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: We analyse the effect of a mandatory kindergarten for four-year-old children on maternal labour supply in Switzerland by using two quasi-experiments: Firstly, we use a large administrative dataset and apply a non-parametric Regression Discontinuity Design to evaluate the effect of the reform at the birthday cut-off for entering the kindergarten in the same versus in the following year. Secondly, we complement this analysis by exploiting spatial variation and staggered treatment implementation of the reform across cantons (administrative units in Switzerland) in a Difference-in-Differences approach using a Swiss household survey. All in all, the results suggest that if anything, mandatory kindergarten increases the labour force attachment of mothers very moderately. The effects are driven by mothers earning less than the median annual work income of 15,706 CHF and by older mothers (>37).

Keywords: mandatory kindergarten; maternal labour supply; regression discontinuity design; difference-in-differences; variable selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H40 J13 J18 J21 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021, Revised 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/247152/1/vfs-2019-pid-28184rev.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:vfsc19:203636

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2019 (Leipzig): 30 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall - Democracy and Market Economy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().