Incentives to work? The impact of a 'Cash-for-Care' benefit for immigrant and native mothers labour market participation

Inés Hardoy and Pål Schøne ()

Labour Economics, 2010, vol. 17, issue 6, 963-974

Abstract: To what extent is labour market participation of mothers sensitive to economic incentives? We answer this question by studying the effect on labour market participation of a Norwegian family policy programme that clearly has affected the incentives to participate in the labour market of mothers with small children. From January 1999, all parents with one- and two-year-old children who did not use publicly subsidised day-care became entitled to a benefit, 'Cash-for-Care' ('CFC'). The CFC reform has increased the price of publicly subsidised day-care relative to the price of own care. Economic theory of labour market participation postulates that the CFC reform would have a negative effect on labour market participation for the person most involved in childcare. The results show that the CFC reform has affected mothers' labour market participation negatively. The effects are much stronger for non-western immigrant mothers' than for native mothers. The results support the hypothesis that non-western immigrant mothers do react to changes in the relative prices of childcare and suggests that non-western female immigrants are quite responsive to changes in economic incentives.

Keywords: Labour; market; Childcare; Non-western; immigrants; Difference-in-differences-in-differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927-5371(10)00030-8
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:labeco:v:17:y:2010:i:6:p:963-974

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 ().