Can Child Care Policy Encourage Employment and Fertility? Evidence from a Structural Model

By P. Haan, Katharina Wrohlich. Social Science Research Network, 2009

232 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we develop a structural model of female employment and fertility which accounts for intertemporal feedback effects between the two outcomes. We identify the effect of financial incentives on the employment and fertility decision by exploiting variation in the tax and transfer system which differs by employment state and number of children. To this end we simulate in detail the effects of the tax and transfer system including child care costs. The model provides estimates of structural preferences of women which can be used to study the effect of various policy reforms. In particular, we show that increasing child care subsidies conditional on employment increases labor supply of all women as well as fertility of the childless and highly educated women.

Subfields: Demography, Gender Studies, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/96e4fdeda42497b96dfd28077ceb297ab7b9f64c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

1. Alexander Bick
2. Nadia Steiber
3. Barbara Haas

In Gender Studies

1. Alexander Bick
2. Nadia Steiber
3. Barbara Haas
4. W. Van Lancker

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Alexander Bick
2. Nadia Steiber
3. Barbara Haas
4. W. Van Lancker

Citations in the corpus

• The Quantitative Role of Child Care for Female Labor Force Participation and Fertility (2016, result): “This contrasts to a number of recent papers using static or dynamic quantitative models to analyze the impact of child care (e.g. Wrohlich, 2006; Attanasio et al., 2008; Haan and Wrohlich, 2009; Domeij and Klein, 2010) which apart from Haan and Wrohlich (2009) treat fertility as exogenous and, excep”
• Advances in explaining women's employment patterns (2012, background): “13 Haan and Wrohlich (2009) show that the provision of public childcare for all children aged below 3 would significantly increase the employment level of German mothers.”
• Institutions and the prevalence of nonstandard employment (2015, unknown): “…and working hours; when childcare is scarce, expensive or of low quality, mothers tend not to work at all or only work part-time (e.g. Del Boca and Vuri, 2007; Breunig et al., 2011; Haan and Wrohlich, 2011; Hennig et al., 2012, on the perceived opportunities to combine work and family duties).”