Local Day-Care Quality and Maternal Employment: Evidence from East and West Germany

Pia Schober () and Katharina Spiess ()

No 649, SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP)

Abstract: By investigating how locally available early childhood education and care quality relates to maternal employment choices, this study extended the literature which has mostly focused on the importance of day-care availability or costs. We provided differentiated analyses by the youngest child’s age and for West and East Germany to examine moderating influences of varying day-care supply and work-care cultures. The empirical analysis linked the Socio-Economic Panel and the ‘Families in Germany‘-Study for 2010 and 2011 (N=3,301 mothers) with regional structural quality data. We used regression models of employment status and work hours changes, respectively. In East Germany, mothers with a child aged under three years who lived in districts with smaller day-care groups were more likely to be employed and to extend their work hours. In West Germany, the negative association of child-teacher-ratios with maternal employment was marginally significant. For mothers with older children, day-care quality was unrelated to employment.

Keywords: Child care; child care arrangements; education; early childhood; family policy; maternal employment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 p.
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.462529.de/diw_sp0649.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:diw:diwsop:diw_sp649

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research from DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().