School Entry, Afternoon Care and Mothers' Labour Supply

Ludovica Gambaro, Jan Marcus and Frauke Peter

No 1622, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: Most literature on the relationship between childcare availability and maternal labour force participation examines childcare for preschool aged children. Yet families must continue to arrange childcare once their children enter primary school, particularly in countries where the school day ends at lunchtime. In this paper we examine the case of Germany, a country that has moved from an exclusively half-day school system to one where formal afternoon care is increasingly available. We estimate the effect of afternoon care on maternal labour supply. To do so, we use a novel matching technique, entropy balancing, and draw on the rich and longitudinal data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). We show that children’s afternoon care increases mothers’ employment rate and their working hours. To confirm the robustness of our results we conduct a series of sensitivity analysis and apply a newly proposed method to assess possible bias from omitted variables. Our findings highlight how childcare availability shapes maternal employment patterns well after school entry.

Keywords: Afternoon care; Maternal labour supply; All-day schools; Entropy balancing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J63 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 p.
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Related works:
Journal Article: School entry, afternoon care, and mothers’ labour supply (2019)
Journal Article: School entry, afternoon care, and mothers' labour supply (2019)
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