School Entry, Afternoon Care and Mothers' Labour Supply

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.

Public childcare provision and employment participation of East and West German mothers with different educational backgrounds

“…A large number of conditioning variables were included in both the matching and the regression equations (Gambaro et al 2019 Similar to the childcare measure, lagged variables of the county-level controls were used. To account for further unobserved influences, all models included period dummies.…”

Do working hours affect health? Evidence from statutory workweek regulations in Germany

“…In contrast, school attendance might be associated with additional parental time demands and the complexity of organizing care around normal school hours (Paull, 2008). Notably, in Germany, the school day traditionally ends at lunchtime and formal after-school care is less available than full-time kindergarten slots (Gambaro et al, 2016). 9 The estimates in Panel C for individuals without dependent children suggest no significant effects of extended working hours on subjective health outcomes.…”

The Effects of After-School Programs on Maternal Employment

“…At first glance this outcome seems to contradict Gambaro et al (2016) since they find positive effects on the employment probability and on hours worked.…”

“…An upward bias in cases like this is not ruled out by Oster bounds or the robustness check on a specific case of reverse causality thatGambaro et al (2016) present.23Nemitz (2015) additionally presents a large positive 2SLS estimate obtained with the SOEP data as some additional evidence for the positive effect. But, as she acknowledges, this estimate suffers from huge standard errors.…”

“…Several recent discussion papers also focus on this reform, but they rely on more restrictive identification assumptions, draw exclusively on SOEP data and find different results than our analysis. Gambaro et al (2016) focus on mothers of first-graders and control for a large set of observables including maternal employment status before school entry. They find a strong effect (11.4 p.p.)…”