No abstract

From 1999, all parents in Norway with children aged one to three, who did not attend publicly subsidised daycare, became eligible for a cash-for-care (CFC) subsidy. One effect of the CFC-subsidy was to increase in the relative price of external child care. This article analyses whether the CFC-subsidy has led to a reduction in the labour supply of mothers. A framework for evaluating policy reforms when reforms are equally and nation-wide accessible is put forward. The results show that the CFC-subsidy has reduced women’s labour supply. The results are sustained after controlling for contemporaneous macroeconomic shocks, using a triple difference approach. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2004J13, J18, J22, Labour supply, child care, difference-in-differences-in-differences,

Norwegian working-life legislation has strict rules against discrimination between full-time and part-time work. Partly as a consequence of this, a large proportion of Norwegian women work part-time. The purpose of this paper is to establish whether there are systematic differences between part-time and fulltime workers regarding the selection process and earnings capacity.We find wage differences between part-time and full-time workers are small in Norway, and there is no evidence of systematic selection bias. The results may be explained by some features of the Norwegian labour market, including, equal rights for part-time workers, strict rules against the discrimination of parttime workers, and a generous family policy enabling women to combine work and family life.

We estimate the direct partial wage effects of immigrant-induced increases in labor supply, using the national skill cell approach with longitudinal records drawn from Norwegian administrative registers. The results show overall negative but heterogeneous wage effects, with larger effects on immigrant wages than on native wages and with native wages more responsive to inflows from Nordic countries than from developing countries. These patterns are consistent with natives and Nordic citizens being close substitutes, while natives and immigrants from developing countries are imperfect substitutes. Estimates are sensitive to accounting for effective immigrant experience, selective native participation, and variation in demand conditions and native labor supply.

We investigate the added worker effect in a setting where female labour supply is high and the welfare state is generous. We trace couples' labour supply and income development following the husband's job displacement. We find no support for the added worker effect for the full sample of households. However, it seems to be at work for subsamples characterised by households where the spouses are not working in the same industry and where the wife did not work full time pre-displacement. When using a measure of total household income, which includes public transfers, we find that the negative income impact of displacement is reduced by approximately 60 to 70 per cent when we also adjust for lower tax payments. Results suggest that income loss due to displacement is mitigated more by social welfare payments than by labour supply responses of the spouse.JEL classification: J15, J63, J65