The effectiveness of policies that promote labor force participation of women with children: A collection of national studies

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents inIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. Numerous countries have enacted policies to promote the labor force participation of women around the years of childbearing, and unsurprisingly, many research articles have been devoted to evaluating their effectiveness. Perhaps more surprisingly, however, six such articles were submitted independently over several months to Labour Economics and subsequently made it through the normal review process. These articles are collected in the Special Section that follows. This article provides additional background to facilitate the understanding of the policies that are evaluated in the Special Section articles and, more importantly, a discussion of what can be learned from the articles as a collection. Taken together, the articles are quite informative in demonstrating how the effectiveness of policies can vary across different national contexts and how this variation itself can be usefully examined with the standard theoretical framework.JEL Classification: J13, J22

Cuidado infantil y participación de la mujer en el mercado laboral de Ecuador

“…Las guarderías, como política social, no sólo buscan beneficiar a las madres sino también a los niños, pues de esta manera se promueve el desarrollo sano del niño y se permite a las mujeres combinar las obligaciones laborales y familiares (Cascio et al, 2015). Por el lado del niño, el cuidado infantil especializado permite el desarrollo personal, la adaptación a la vida escolar y su integración a la sociedad, a través del desarrollo de sus facultades físicas e intelectuales (Llorent, 2013).…”

“…Edad del niño: está agrupada entre las edades de 0-2 años y 3-4 años. Esta división fue realizada considerando que los niños más pequeños requieren más atención y cuidados (Cascio et al 2015;Attanasio et al 2008;Blau, 2001 En lo que se refiere al tipo de estructura familiar, a partir de la Figura 7 se puede inferir que las madres acompañadas que tienen educación secundaria serían más propensas a no trabajar. Esto podría estar relacionado con la presencia de madres adolescentes en este grupo, quienes debido a su edad, aún se encuentran cursando el bachillerato (INEC, 2010).…”

Can universal preschool increase the labor supply of mothers?

“…To understand the links between the cost of preschool education and maternal labor supply, it is useful to consider a mother's decision on how to split her time between working (and implicitly using nonparental childcare) and leisure (and implicitly taking care of the child herself) [1]. In making this choice, a mother is constrained by her financial resources, which depend on her labor income net of the cost of preschool, and on her non-labor income (such as welfare support and her partner's labor income).…”

The Effect of All-Day Primary School Programs on Maternal Labor Supply

“…It tends to be smaller if the share of AD primary schools among all primary schools is lower (cf. Cascio et al 2015).…”

“…loss in social esteem, "Rabenmutter") may, however, suppress maternal use of childcare (Blau & Robins 1988, Ribar 1992. Moreover, a high initial level of childcare supply and/or maternal employment can limit the scope of such programs (Cascio et al 2015). A priori, it is thus unclear whether or not maternal labor supply indeed increases in response to childcare programs.…”