trends in time allocation a cross country analysis abstract using detailed time use data for seven industrialized countries from the 1970s until today we document general decreases in men s market work coupled with increases in men s unpaid work and child care and increases in women s paid work and child care coupled with decreases in unpaid work we also find almost universal increases in the time devoted to watching television over this period and uncover a widespread increase in leisure inequality in favor of lower educated adults trends in leisure inequality mirror the general increase in income and earnings inequality experienced in most countries over this period especially after the mid 1980s all these findings are consistent with previous results for the us however in contrast to the increases in leisure found for the us we fail to find common trends in leisure time across countries over the period analyzed

multiple experiments for the causal link between the quantity and quality of children this article presents evidence on the child quantity child quality trade off using quasi experimental variation due to twin births and preferences for a mixed sibling sex composition as well as ethnic differences in the effects of these variables our sample includes groups with very high fertility an innovation in our econometric approach is the juxtaposition of results from multiple instrumental variables strategies capturing the effects of fertility over different ranges for different sorts of people to increase precision we develop an estimator that combines different instrument sets across partially overlapping parity specific subsamples our results are remarkably consistent in showing no evidence of a quantity quality trade off

child care policy and the labor supply of mothers with young children a natural experiment from canada in 1997 the provincial government of quebec the second most populous province in canada initiated a new child care policy licensed child care service providers began offering day care spaces at the reduced fee of 5 00 per day per child for children aged 4 by 2000 the policy applied to all children not in kindergarten using annual data 1993 2002 drawn from statistics canada s survey of labour and income dynamics the results show that the policy had a large and statistically significant impact on the labor supply of mothers with preschool children

selection investment and women s relative wages over time in theory growing wage inequality within gender should cause women to invest more in their market productivity and should differentially pull able women into the workforce our paper uses heckman s two step estimator and identification at infinity on repeated current population survey cross sections to calculate relative wage series for women since 1970 that hold constant the composition of skills we find that selection into the female full time full year workforce shifted from negative in the 1970s to positive in the 1990s and that the majority of the apparent narrowing of the gender wage gap reflects changes in female workforce composition we find the same types of composition changes by measuring husbands wages and national longitudinal survey iq data as proxies for unobserved skills our findings help to explain why growing wage equality between genders coincided with growing inequality within gender

preschool for all enrollment and maternal labour supply implications of a bilingual preschool policy abstractprevious research supports the effectiveness of preschool in various contexts yet there is limited evidence whether universal type preschool policies induce changes in enrollment while ce

price of high quality daycare and female employment using local variation between municipalities i analyze the degree to which the price of high quality publicly subsidized childcare affects female employment following maternity leave importantly prices are income dependent and thus likely endogenous yet by exploiting information on minimum income compensation during non employment i bypass this problem the results show that the price negatively affects employment a price increase of 1 per month decreases employment by 0 08 which corresponds to a price elasticity of 0 17 these effects prevail during the first 12 months after childbirth i also find that availability of childcare increases employment

women prefer larger governments female labor supply and public spending the increase in income per capita is accompanied in virtually all countries by two changes in the structure of the economy an increase in the share of government spending in gdp and an increase in female labor force participation this paper suggests that these two changes are not just overlapping in time they are causally related this paper develops a growth model with endogenous fertility labor force participation and government size that illustrates this causal link economic development is accompanied by an increase in the female market wage thus increasing the opportunity cost of staying at home if government spending decreases the time cost of performing household chores including but not limited to child rearing and child care it makes sense for women to enter the labor market and demand higher government spending financed by increased taxation as women make the decision to work outside the home they increase their demand for services typically provided by the government such as education and health care which in turn decrease the cost of home and family activities that are overwhelmingly performed by women using a wide cross section of data for developed and developing countries we show that higher rates of female participation in the labor market are indeed positively associated with larger governments furthermore we investigate the causal link between the two variables using as instrumental variables for female labor force participation newly collected data on the relative price of home appliances as well as the fertility rate we find evidence of a causal link between female labor force participation and government size a 10 percent rise in female participation in the labor market leads to a 7 to 8 percent rise in government size this effect is robust to the country sample time period and a set of controls in the spirit of rodrik 1998

is universal child care leveling the playing field abstract we assess the case for universal child care programs in the context of a norwegian reform which led to a large scale expansion of subsidized child care we use non linear difference in differences methods to estimate the quantile treatment effects of the reform we find that the effects of the child care expansion were positive in the lower and middle parts of the earnings distribution of exposed children as adults and negative in the uppermost part we complement this analysis with local linear regressions of the child care effects by family income we find that most of the gains in earnings associated with the universal child care program relate to children of low income parents whereas upper class children actually experience a loss in earnings in line with the differential effects by family income we estimate that the universal child care program substantially increased intergenerational income mobility to interpret the estimated heterogeneity in child care effects we examine the mediating role of educational attainment and cognitive test scores and show that our estimates are consistent with a simple model where parents make a tradeoff between current family consumption and investment in children taken together our findings could have important implications for the policy debate over universal child care programs suggesting that the benefits of providing subsidized child care to middle and upper class children are unlikely to exceed the costs our study also points to the importance of universal child care programs in explaining differences in earnings inequality and income mobility across countries and over time

transfers in cash and in kind theory meets the data we review theoretical explanations for in kind transfers in light of the limited empirical evidence after reviewing the traditional paternalistic arguments we consider explanations based on imperfect information and self targeting we then discuss the large literature on in kind programs as a way of improving the efficiency of the tax system and a range of other possible explanations including the samaritan s dilemma pecuniary effects credit constraints asymmetric information amongst agents and political economy considerations our reading of the evidence suggests that paternalism and interdependent preferences are leading overall explanations for the existence of in kind transfer programs but that some of the other arguments may apply to specific cases political economy considerations must also be part of the story

maternal labor supply and the availability of public pre k evidence from the introduction of prekindergarten into american public schools in the 1980s and 1990s many states began to provide funding for prekindergarten programs for the first time this paper takes advantage of the staggered timing in program funding to investigate the effect that increased availability of prekindergarten programs has on the labor supply of mothers with four year olds i find that mothers with a four year old and no younger children were significantly more likely to be in the labor force and employed once prekindergarten became available and that these effects were largest for single low educated mothers and married college educated mothers mothers with a four year old and other younger children were also significantly more likely to be in the labor force and employed although these effects were smaller in magnitude and not significant for specific subpopulations

effect of lengthening the school day on mother s labor supply this article examines how a policy oriented toward a specific group within the population can have collateral effects on the economic decisions of other groups in 1996 the chilean government approved the extension of the school day from half to full day school this article exploits the quasi experimental nature of the reform s implementation by time municipality and age targeting of the program in order to examine how the maternal labor supply is affected by the childcare subsidy implicit in the lengthening of the school day using data from the chilean socioeconomic household survey and administrative data from the ministry of education for 1990 2011 the authors estimate that on average there is a 5 percent increase in labor participation and employment rates of single mothers with eligible children between 8 and 13 years old with no younger children who are the group that would be mainly affected by the policy no significant labor supply responses are detected among others mothers with eligible children

nonlinear contracts zero profits and moral hazard contracts that base payments on an ex post variable are examined it is shown that a quadratic contract form may elicit truthful responses from auction participants and offer zero expected profits to the winning bidder but not eliminate adverse incentives ex post a general impossibility theorem is proven this theorem establishes that regardless of functional form no contract can offer zero expected profits and resolve the ex post moral hazard problem copyright 1987 by the review of economic studies limited

the effect of pre primary education on primary school performance although the theoretical case for universal pre primary education is strong the empirical foundation is weak in this paper we contribute to the empirical case by investigating the effect of a large expansion of universal pre primary education on subsequent primary school performance in argentina we estimate that one year of preprimary school increases average third grade test scores by 8 percent of a mean or by 23 percent of the standard deviation of the distribution of test scores we also find that preprimary school attendance positively affects student s self control in the third grade as measured by behaviors such as attention effort class participation and discipline

the supply of child care labor this article presents estimates of the elasticity of supply of labor to child care this parameter is an important determinant of the effects of child care subsidies and regulations on the cost of child care using data from the current population survey there is evidence of an elasticity in the range of 1 2 1 9 this implies that the majority of the benefits of child care subsidies accrue to consumers of child care it is also consistent with the fact that child care workers wages remained flat in real terms in recent years despite rapid growth in the demand for child care

money for nothing universal child care and maternal employment abstract the strong correlation between child care and maternal employment rates has led previous research to conclude that affordable and readily available child care is a driving force both of cross country differences in maternal employment and of its rapid growth over the last decades we analyze a staged expansion of subsidized child care in norway our precise and robust difference in differences estimates reveal that there is little if any causal effect of subsidized child care on maternal employment despite a strong correlation instead of increasing mothers labor supply the new subsidized child care mostly crowds out informal child care arrangements suggesting a significant net cost of the child care subsidies

unequal pay or unequal employment a cross country analysis of gender gaps we analyze gender wage gaps correcting for sample selection induced by nonemployment we recover wages for the nonemployed using alternative imputation techniques simply requiring assumptions on the position of imputed wages with respect to the median we obtain higher median wage gaps on imputed rather than actual wage distributions for several oecd countries however this difference is small in the united states the united kingdom and most central and northern eu countries and becomes sizable in southern eu countries where gender employment gaps are high selection correction explains nearly half of the observed negative correlation between wage and employment gaps

low skilled immigration and parenting investments of college educated mothers in the united states evidence from time use data this paper uses several decades of u s time diary surveys to assess the impact of low skilled immigration through lower prices for commercial childcare on parental time investments using an instrumental variables approach that accounts for the endogenous location of immigrants we find that low skilled immigration to the united states has contributed to substantial reductions in the time allocated to basic childcare by college educated mothers of nonschool aged children however these mothers have not reduced the time allocated to more stimulating educational and recreational activities with their children understanding the factors driving parental time investments on children is crucial from a child development perspective

temporary contracts and work family balance in a dual labor market a well established finding in the literature is that self employment enables mothers to accommodate work and family needs better than when they are engaged in organizational employment with this result in mind the authors investigate within a dual system of job protection if women under temporary contracts face greater work family conflicts than those under permanent contracts the authors use data on women s work and fertility histories from the spanish continuous sample of working histories to analyze whether women under temporary contracts transition to self employment upon motherhood more than those who are under permanent contracts analyses show that being under a temporary contract increases women s likelihood of transitioning to self employment upon childbirth supplementary analyses show that this is partly the result of voluntary transitions and not an employer s decision to terminate a temporary contract upon motherhood overall these findings reveal a hidden cost of temporary contracts the greater difficulty in balancing work and family

psychiatric disorders and labor market outcomes evidence from the national comorbidity survey replication this paper uses the national comorbidity survey replication to estimate effects of recent psychiatric disorder on employment hours worked and earnings we employ methods proposed in altonji et al 2005a which use selection on observable traits to provide information regarding selection along unobservable factors among males disorder is associated with reductions in labor force participation and employment when selection on observed characteristics is set equal to selection on unobserved characteristics the magnitudes of these effects for males are 9 and 14 percentage point reductions for participation and employment respectively among females we find negative associations between disorder and labor force participation and employment but these estimates are more sensitive to assumptions about selection there are no effects of disorder on earnings or hours worked among employed individuals

maquiladoras and market mamas women s work and childcare in guatemala city and accra abstract this paper analyses work childcare and earnings of mothers in the slums of guatemala city and accra similar factors affect decisions to work and to use formal daycare but the importance of childcare varies with the role of the formal labour sector in guatemala where formal sector work is important higher prices for informal care increase formal daycare use however daycare prices and proximity to daycare centers do not significantly affect earnings in guatemala city and accra respectively providing formal daycare may be more important to mothers decision to work in cities where formal sector work dominates

taxes and the timing of births because the tax savings of having a child are a realized only if the birth takes place before midnight january 1 the incentives for the marginal birth are substantial using a sample of children from the national longitudinal survey of youth we find that the probability that a child is born in the last week of december rather than the first week of january is positively correlated with tax benefits we estimate that increasing the tax benefit of having a child by 500 raises the probability of having the child in the last week of december by 26 9 percent

incentive contracts and competitive bidding an increasing segment of economic activity is taking place in nonmarket situations in which economic agents act outside the traditional markets or create markets to deal with specific resource allocation problems one such problem involves the selection by a buyer of a contractor using a competitive bidding process competitive bidding is used extensively by the government for the selection of suppliers of goods and services and for the sale of resources such as offshore oil leases firms may use competitive bidding for the selection of certain suppliers of factor inputs and may attempt to sell certain products in markets in which competitive price quoting is the established market mechanism this paper is concerned with a bidding process in which a firm has an opportunity to bid on a project under the terms of an incentive contract incentive contracts

did workers pay for the passage of workers compensation laws market responses to legislative reforms often mitigate the expected gains that reformers promise in legislation contemporaries hailed workers compensation as a boon to workers because it raised the amount of postaccident compensation paid to injured workers despite the large gains to workers employers often supported the legislation analysis of several wage samples from the early 1900s shows that employers were able to pass a significant part of the added costs of higher postaccident compensation on to some workers in the form of reductions in wages the size of the wage offsets however was smaller for union workers

child care costs as a barrier to employment for single and married mothers because women typically serve as primary care providers for their children female labor force participation behavior is likely to be affected significantly by the costs associated with replacing maternal care with nonmaternal care while some evidence of this phenomenon exists in the economics literature discrepancies across studies make it difficult to provide conclusive evidence of the employment effects of these child care costs this paper uses an improved sipp survey design to present new evidence regarding the degree to which child care prices impede mothers employment behavior with additional evidence of the difference in these elasticities across marital status empirical technique and equation specification this permits linking this paper to the existing evidence drawing the conclusion that child care prices impede mothers employment behavior significantly with single mothers exhibiting less responsiveness in their labor force participation behavior to child care price changes than marri

the effect of child care costs on married women s labor force participation the effect of child care costs on the probability that married women with children will participate in the labor market is examined child care costs are estimated using a generalized tobit specification corrected for selection estimates of a structural probit model of labor force participation provide evidence to support the prediction that increased child care costs lower the probability of participation it is also shown that the lower rate of labor force participation among mothers of preschoolers is entirely the result of the higher child care costs faced by these women and endogeneity of the number of young children in the participation equation copyright 1992 by mit press

women s career choices social norms and child care policies our model explains the observed gender specific patterns of career and child care choices through endogenous social norms we study how these norms interact with the gender wage gap we show that via the social norm a couple s child care and career choices impose an externality on other couples so that the laissez faire is inefficient we use our model to study the design and effectiveness of three commonly used policies we find that child care subsidies and women quotas can be effective tools to mitigate or eliminate the externality parental leave however may even intensify the externality and decrease welfare

easing the constraints of motherhood the effects of all day schools on mothers labor supply low rates of female labor force participation lfp have been linked to the absence of childcare policies this article examines the degree to which extending the school day by 3 5 hours in elementary schools a large implicit childcare subsidy affects lfp the number of weekly hours worked and the monthly earnings of females with elementary school age children to do so we exploit within individual variation in access to full time schools and a rotating panel of households that contains 12 years of individual level data on labor outcomes and sociodemographic characteristics results from long difference models show that extending the school day increases mothers labor supply increasing lfp by 5 5 percentage points and the number of weekly hours worked by 1 8 moreover these increases are accompanied by a raise in monthly earnings jel i25 j13 j22

giving children a better start preschool attendance and school age profiles this brief summarizes the giving children a better start preschool attendance and school age profiles in uruguay for the period 1995 the author study the effect of pre primary education on children s subsequent school outcomes by exploiting a unique feature of the uruguayan household survey ech that collects retrospective information on preschool attendance in the context of a rapid expansion in the supply of pre primary places using a within household estimator we find small gains from preschool attendance at early ages that get magnified as children grow up by age 15 treated children have accumulated 0 8 extra years of education and are 27 percentage points more likely to be in school compared to their untreated siblings instrumental variables estimates that attempt to control for non random selection of siblings into preschool lead to similar results pre primary education appears as a successful and cost effective policy to prevent early grade failure and its long lasting consequences in low income countries

child care subsidies quality of care and the labor supply of low income single mothers the authors examine the effects of child care subsidies on the labor supply decisions of low income mothers and o n the quality of care their children receive using newly gathered data on two programs that subsidize the child care expenditures of families in kentucky they find that single mothers who receive child care subsidies are more likely to be employed and are generally more satisfied with the care their children receive but subsidies have little effect on hours worked copyright 1992 by mit press

children of a policy revolution the introduction of universal child care and its effect on fertility what role does affordable and widely available public child care play for fertility we exploit a major german reform generating large temporal and spatial variation in child care coverage for children under the age of three our precise and robust estimates on birth register data reveal that increases in public child care have significant positive effects on fertility the fertility effects are more pronounced at the intensive than at the extensive margin and are not driven by changes in the timing of births or selective migration our findings inform policy makers concerned about low fertility by suggesting that universal early child care holds the promise of being an effective means of increasing birth rates

does compulsory school attendance affect schooling and earnings we establish that season of birth is related to educational attainment because of school start age policy and compulsory school attendance laws individuals born in the beginning of the year start school at an older age and can therefore drop out after completing less schooling than individuals born near the end of the year roughly 25 percent of potential dropouts remain in school because of compulsory schooling laws we estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings by using quarter of birth as an instrument for education the instrumental variables estimate of the return to education is close to the ordinary least squares estimate suggesting that there is little bias in conventional estimates every developed country in the world has a compulsory schooling requirement yet little is known about the effect these laws have on educational attainment and earnings 1 this paper exploits an unusual natural experiment to estimate the impact of compulsory schooling laws in the united states the experiment stems from the fact that children born in different months of the year start school at different ages while compulsory schooling laws generally require students to remain in school until their sixteenth or seventeenth birthday in effect the interaction of school entry requirements and compulsory schooling laws compel students born

the impact of non parental child care on child development evidence from the summer participation dip abstract although a large literature examines the effect of non parental child care on preschool aged children s cognitive development few studies deal convincingly with the potential endogeneity of child care choices using a panel of infants and toddlers from the birth cohort of the early childhood longitudinal study ecls b this paper attempts to provide causal estimates by leveraging heretofore unrecognized seasonal variation in child care participation child assessments in the ecls b were conducted on a rolling basis throughout the year and i use the participation dip among those assessed during the summer as the basis for an instrumental variable the summer participation dip is likely to be exogenous because ecls b administrators strictly controlled the mechanism by which children were assigned to assessment dates the ols results show that children utilizing non parental arrangements score higher on tests of cognitive ability a finding that holds after accounting for individual fixed effects however the instrumental variables estimates point to sizeable negative effects of non parental care the adverse effects are driven by participation in formal settings and contrary to previous research i find that disadvantaged children do not benefit from exposure to non parental care

employment of new mothers and child care choice differences by children s age working women frequently withdraw from the formal labor market for a period of time following their 1st birth while more than 1 3 of these mothers return to work within 3 months 1 2 remain out of formal employment 2 years after giving birth this paper examines the determinants of womens return to the labor market within 2 years of childbirth and the type of child care women choose employing data from the national longitudinal survey of youth the study found economic incentives to have powerful effects upon mothers work behavior despite cultural norms which may encourage mothers to care for their very young children mothers wages and other family income were important determinants the relationship between child care costs and work and child care choice change as children age with mothers being most sensitive to the psychic and financial costs of care in the months immediately following childbirth specifically the presence of mothers personal wages relates positively to early return to work and higher family income delays return to work greater child care tax credits increase the return to work within 3 months yet have little effect on later labor supply neither wages income nor tax credits significantly affected child care choice overall financial variables had less impact on type of child care than on the decision to work

state mandated benefits and employer provided health insurance abstract one popular explanation for the low rate of employee health insurance coverage is the presence of numerous state regulations which mandate that group health insurance plans must include certain benefits by raising the minimum cost of providing any health insurance coverage these mandated benefits make it impossible for firms which would have desired to offer minimal health insurance at a low cost to do so i use data on insurance coverage among employees in small firms to investigate whether this problem is an important cause of employee non insurance i find that mandates have little effect on the rate of insurance coverage this finding is robust to a variety of specifications of the regulations i also find that this lack of an effect may be because mandates are not binding since most firms appear to offer these benefits even in the absence of regulation

does school quality matter returns to education and the characteristics of public schools in the united states this paper estimates the effects of school quality measured by the pupil teacher ratio average term length and relative teacher pay on the rate of return to education for men born between 1920 and 1949 using earnings data from the 1980 census we find that men who were educated in states with higher quality schools have a higher return to additional years of schooling rates of return are also higher for individuals from states with better educated teachers and with a higher fraction of female teachers holding constant school quality measures however we find no evidence that parental income or education affects average state level rates of return

the incidence of mandated maternity benefits i consider the labor market effects of mandates which raise the costs of employing a demographically identifiable group the efficiency of these policies will be largely dependent on the extent to which their costs are shifted to group specific wages i study several state and federal mandates which stipulated that childbirth be covered comprehensively in health insurance plans raising the relative cost of insuring women of childbearing age i find substantial shifting of the costs of these mandates to the wages of the targeted group correspondingly i find little effect on total labor input for that group jel 118 j32 h51 in an era of tight fiscal budget constraints mandating employer provision of workplace benefits to employees is an attractive means for a government to finance its policy agenda consequently in recent years there has been a growth of interest in mandated benefits as a tool of social policy for example the centerpiece of president bill clinton s health care proposal is mandated employer provision of health insurance and more than 20 states have man

great expectations and hard times the argentine convertibility plan this paper studies the process that led to the argentine crisis the analysis concentrates on the sequence of public and private decisions together with the varying perceptions and policy incentives that motivated them in the 1990s argentina searched for a new growth trend during much of the period the behavior of agents seemed to be based on the anticipation that current and future incomes could sustain a value of domestic spending much higher than in the past in both real and dollar terms the government was motivated to reinforce those expectations for signaling and political economy reasons the monetary regime not only provided a very visible nominal anchor but also operated as a basic framework for financial contracts mostly denominated in dollars dollar contracting implicitly presumed that the dollar value of incomes would support the servicing of debts despite precautionary actions on the part of the government and the private sector over time an increasing mass of decisions and contracts came to rely on the sustainability of the real exchange rate in the late 1990s exports stopped rising and the foreign supply of credit tightened the economy contracted in the face of these constraints and the solvency of the government was called into question the financial system was vulnerable both in the event of devaluation and in the event of a large deflation cum adjustment convertibility proved to have very large exit costs as was implicit in its design and management

heterogeneity and the effect of mental health parity mandates on the labor market health insurance benefit mandates are believed to have adverse effects on the labor market but efforts to document such effects for mental health parity mandates have had limited success i show that one reason for this failure is that the association between parity mandates and labor market outcomes vary with mental distress accounting for this heterogeneity i find adverse labor market effects for non distressed individuals but favorable effects for moderately distressed individuals and individuals with a moderately distressed family member on net i conclude that the mandates are welfare increasing for moderately distressed workers and their families but may be welfare decreasing for non distressed individuals

tax credits labor supply and child care we explore the impact of the child care tax credit in the u s income tax system on the labor supply decisions of married women with young children by incorporating the cost of child care into a st

women prefer larger governments growth structural transformation and government size i introduction in developing and developed economies alike growth of income per capita is generally accompanied by a rise in the share of government expenditure in gross domestic product gdp as well as an increase in the participation of women in the labor force we argue that these phenomena are causally related propose a model that motivates that relation and provide evidence in its support the share of total government spending in gdp has increased by 10 in organization for economic cooperation and development oecd countries in the last two decades alone see world bank 2001 and this rise comes in the wake of significant secular increases in government spending in the 20th century 1 apace with this rise in the government s share of gdp female labor force participation has also risen from 28 to 41 in the same countries and the same period 2 as for the long run goldin 1995 reports an increase in female labor force participation in the united states between 1900 and 1980 from 3 1 to 50 of the labor force 3 while according to tanzi and schuknecht 2000 the share of government spending rose in the same period from 8 to 30 figure 1 plots the change in government size as a share of gdp versus the change in female labor force participation from 1972 to 1999 for a sample of selected countries the twin increases in female labor force participation and government size are not a coincidence they are causally related the mechanism at work is twofold as wages rise with development and women choose to work more hours in the market they increase their demand for services that tend to be provided by the government including education healthcare care for the elderly and the unemployed the additional provision of government services further encourages female labor market participation as it decreases the time necessary to perform those home and family activities whose burden falls disproportionately on women 4 this circle of causation leads to higher female participation and larger governments our growth model extends galor and weil 1996 in addition to female participation in market activities fertility and output government size is also endogenously determined the rise in hourly wages that accompanies development and capital accumulation leads to an increase in female labor force participation as the opportunity cost of caring for the children increases in our model government spending decreases the time cost of performing household chores one obvious connection is the provision of extra school hours and child care which decrease the time cost of child rearing as couples women in particular participate more in market activities they choose higher government spending to compensate for time spent in the market under certain conditions which we make explicit they also choose higher tax rates with the result that female labor force participation and government size increase apace 5 as female labor force participation leads to a larger government the total cost of raising children is reduced for two reasons the total time at home decreases and the time cost per child also falls as public spending partly substitutes for home production of child care education and other activities 6 the decision to work outside the home is likely to lead women to demand wider and better provision of the public services that alleviate their unequal burden as caregiver at home in addition the role of women as insurer of family risks may lead to a demand for more government intervention as women become less present at home there is an additional mechanism through the composition of the public labor force government jobs in teaching and health which are a large portion of total public jobs tend to be filled mostly by women 7 our model draws on the solid literature on growth fertility and female labor force participation which is supported by microevidence

how can korea raise its future potential growth rate korea has achieved tremendous economic progress over the last three and a half decades but in recent years growth has slowed down and looking forward most forecasters expect potential growth to decline substantially how can korea avoid this decline and improve its growth prospects we provide answers to these questions by analyzing the key factors determining potential growth in korea using a production function methodology and conducting simulations tracing the path of potential growth to 2050 under different scenarios our analysis suggests that only if korea implements swift reforms to address the low productivity of its service sector and prevent the decline in its labor supply by boosting in particular female participation rates can the korean economy achieve a doubling of its per capita income level by 2020 without a rapid response this goal will be unachievable and the expected growth slowdown will be unavoidable the paper discusses reforms intended to boost productivity in services and labor force participation and estimates that those could korea sustain growth at double its expected real growth rate in the business as usual scenario in the period 2020 2040

the effects of rural electrification on employment new evidence from south africa this paper estimates the impact of electrification on employment growth by analyzing south africa s mass roll out of electricity to rural households using several new data sources and two different identification strategies an instrumental variables strategy and a fixed effects approach i find that electrification significantly raises female employment within five years this new infrastructure appears to increase hours of work for men and women while reducing female wages and increasing male earnings several pieces of evidence suggest that household electrification raises employment by releasing women from home production and enabling microenterprises migration behavior may also be affected jel h54 l94

an investigation of the average bid mechanism for procurement auctions in a procurement context it can be quite costly for a buyer when the winning seller underestimates the cost of a project and then defaults on the project midway through completion the average bid auction is one mechanism intended to help address this problem this format involves awarding the contract to the bidder who has bid closest to the average of the bids submitted we compare the performance of this mechanism with the standard low price mechanism to determine how successful the average bid format is in preventing bidder losses as well as its impact on the price paid by the buyer we find the average bid mechanism to be more successful than expected because surprisingly bidding behavior remains similar between the average bid and low price auctions we provide an explanation for the bidding behavior in the average bid auction that is based on subjects having problems processing signals near the extremes of the distribution this paper was accepted by teck hua ho behavioral economics

the demand for quality in child care we estimate a model of demand for quality related attributes of child care group size staff child ratio and provider training the model is estimated jointly with equations for mode expenditure on and hours of care and the mother s labor supply the results show that a lower price of child care in a particular mode leads to substitution toward that mode and an increase in the use of paid child care a decrease in the price of care causes an increase in hours of care demanded and a decrease in the demand for qualityrelated attributes income effects on demand for quality are small

children and household economic behavior this paper looks at some of the methodological issues that arise in modeling the effects of children on household behavior and presents some estimates for selected areas for our purposes household behavior will be taken to refer to household decisions on labor supply the allocation of expenditure to different periods and the decision as to what to do with the difference between income and expenditure i shall be concerned mainly with the effects of dependent children and i restrict attention largely to western societies excerpt

labor market consequences of state health insurance regulation this study based mainly on the 1989 98 march current population surveys finds that state mandated health insurance benefits and small group health insurance reform had no statistically significant effects on labor market outcomes such as the quantity of work wages and whether an employee worked for a small or large firm the number and type of state mandated health insurance benefits were unrelated to weeks of work wages and the prevalence of private insurance coverage but positively associated with weekly work hours extensive small group health insurance reform was associated with a slight decline in the prevalence of private insurance coverage in small firms and this reform affected both full and part time employees less extensive reforms were not generally related to the prevalence of private insurance coverage overall the authors do not find strong evidence that insurance regulations affected labor market outcomes although they appear to cause a small decrease in private coverage

children and their parents labor supply evidence from exogenous variation in family size although theoretical models of labor supply and the family are well developed there are few credible estimates of key empirical relationships in the work family nexus this study uses a new instrumental variable the sex composition of the first two births in families with at least two children to estimate the effect of additional children on parents labor supply in the united states instrumental variables estimates using the sex mix are substantial but smaller than the corresponding ordinary least squares ols estimates moreover unlike the ols estimates the female labor supply effects estimated using sex mix instruments appear to be absent among more educated women and women with high wage husbands we also find that married women who have a third child reduce their labor supply by as much as women in the full sample while there is no relationship between wives child bearing and husbands labor supply excerpt

more power to the pill the impact of contraceptive freedom on women s life cycle labor supply the release of enovid in 1960 the first birth control pill afforded u s women unprecedented freedom to plan childbearing and their careers this paper uses plausibly exogenous variation in state consent laws to evaluate the causal impact of the pill on the timing of first births and extent and intensity of women s labor force participation the results suggest that legal access to the pill before age 21 significantly reduced the likelihood of a first birth before age 22 increased the number of women in the paid labor force and raised the number of annual hours worked

born on the first of july an un natural experiment in birth timing abstract it is well understood that government policies can distort behavior but what is less often recognized is that the anticipated introduction of a policy can introduce its own distortions we study one such introduction effect using evidence from a unique policy change in australia in 2004 the australian government announced that children born on or after july 1 2004 would receive a 3000 baby bonus although the policy was only announced seven weeks before its introduction parents appear to have behaved strategically in order to receive the benefit with the number of births dipping sharply before the policy commenced on july 1 2004 more australian children were born than on any other single date in the past thirty years we estimate that over 1000 births were moved so as to ensure that their parents were eligible for the baby bonus with about one quarter being moved by more than one week most of the effect was due to changes in the timing of induction and cesarean section procedures we find evidence to suggest that babies who were shifted into the eligibility period were more likely to be of high birth weight two years later on july 1 2006 the baby bonus was increased and we find that this again caused births to be moved from june to july these birth timing events represent an opportunity for health researchers to study the impact of planned birthdays and hospital management issues

public child care and mothers labor supply evidence from two quasi experiments abstract public child care is expected to assist families in reconciling work with family life yet empirical evidence for the relevance of public child care to maternal employment is inconclusive we exploit the introduction of a legal claim to a place in kindergarten in germany which was contingent on day of birth cut off dates and resulted in a marked increase in kindergarten attendance of three year olds in the following years instrumental variable and difference in differences estimations on two individual level data sets yield positive effects of public child care on maternal employment a set of placebo treatment tests corroborate the validity of our identification strategies

estimating the effect of financial aid offers on college enrollment a regression discontinuity approach an important problem faced by colleges and universities that of evaluating the effect of their financial aid offers on student enrollment decisions is complicated by the likely endogeneity of the aid offer variable in a student enrollment equation this article shows how discontinuities in an east coast college s aid assignment rule can be exploited to obtain credible estimates of the aid effect without having to rely on arbitrary exclusion restrictions and functional form assumptions semiparametric estimates based on a regression discontinuity rd approach affirm the importance of financial aid as an effective instrument in competing with other colleges for students

single mothers working at night standard work and child care subsidies a single parent is constantly scrambling for someone to care for her two preschool daughters while she processes paperwork and inmates at a county jail in winston salem n c hers is an unpredictable ever shifting schedule some days she picks up the phone and calls in her sister who s often busy with her own teen ager some nights she persuades a friend with two little ones of her own to let the girls sleep over her predicament is shared by millions of americans who find themselves working long nonstandard or erratic hours and having to hunt for child care to match hays 1995 i introduction working outside the standard weekday hours of 8 a m to 6 p m between monday and friday is an increasingly common practice in the united states for example 34 3 of all female workers in the united states were nonstandard workers in 1995 kalleberg et al 1997 the investigation of nonstandard work is important for a number of reasons first there is evidence suggesting that workers engaged in nonstandard work are more likely to be assigned to routine jobs and to receive less training and fewer promotions than others barker 1993 tilly 1996 consequently these workers tend to earn less and they are less likely to have health insurance and pension benefits than standard workers hipple and stewart 1996 loprest 1999 and 2002 there also exists a positive link between the quality of an initial job and the likelihood of maintaining employment over time cancian and meyer 2000 rangarajan et al 1998 strawn and martinson 2000 second nonstandard work is linked to a number of adverse outcomes for parents and children such as work and family conflicts marital instability health problems for both parents and children and poor educational outcomes for children heymann 2000 presser 2000 staines and pleck 1983 finally the majority of nonstandard workers view employment during nonstandard hours as an accommodation to labor market needs not as a personal preference according to the current population survey more than half of the workers with nonstandard schedules report the nature of their jobs as the reason for their choice only about 6 of nonstandard workers report working such schedules for better pay and only 4 give better child care as their reason for working nonstandard schedules beers 2000 with the passage of welfare reform in 1996 child care assistance has become a more significant tool for helping welfare recipients move into the workforce and for helping other low income families stay off welfare 1 according to the general accounting office gao the majority of states make welfare recipients and families transitioning from welfare to work eligible for child care assistance or give them priority over other low income families when resources are insufficient to cover all who apply gao 2003 almost a decade after the passage of welfare reform congress now debates legislation to reauthorize welfare reform and child care funding remains a key issue however very little is known about whether child care subsidies have in fact played a role in increasing employment among welfare recipients or in general low income individuals in the post welfare reform period blank 2002 even less is known about the effect of these subsidies on standard nonstandard employment decisions of these individuals since the passage of welfare reform the employment rate of single mothers has risen dramatically jones deweer et al 2003 however leaving welfare does not necessarily mean gaining adequate work and increasing economic serf sufficiency in fact only 8 of welfare leavers have been able to sustain employment over a period of four years martinson 2000 over three quarters 78 of employed low income single mothers are concentrated in typically low wage and low benefit occupations jones deweer et al 2003 these occupations typically demand a greater number of hours outside the standard weekday times of 8 a

childcare effects on maternal employment evidence from chile abstract using a randomized experiment this study examines whether offering afterschool care for children aged between 6 and 13 has an impact on labor market outcomes for women in chile the results show that program participation increases employment by 5 and labor force participation by 7 while the intervention also generates substantial childcare substitution the results also suggest that the provision of afterschool care for older children triggers the use of free daycare for young ineligible children

schooling and labor market consequences of school construction in indonesia evidence from an unusual policy experiment between 1973 and 1978 the indonesian government engaged in one of the largest school construction programs on record combining differences across regions in the number of schools constructed with differences across cohorts induced by the timing of the program suggests that each primary school constructed per 1 000 children led to an average increase of 0 12 to 0 19 years of education as well as a 1 5 to 2 7 percent increase in wages this implies estimates of economic returns to education ranging from 6 8 to 10 6 percent

preschoolers enrolled and mothers at work the effects of universal prekindergarten three states recently introduced universal prekindergarten programs offering free preschool to all age eligible children policy makers in many other states are promoting similar programs using restricted access data from the census together with birthday based eligibility cutoffs i employ a regression discontinuity framework to estimate the effects of universal pre k availability on overall preschool enrollment and maternal labor supply universal pre k availability increases statewide preschool enrollment by about 14 but has little effect on the labor supply of most women

broadband in the labor market the impact of residential high speed internet on married women s labor force participation the author investigates how high speed home internet use has affected labor supply using an instrumental variables strategy that exploits cross state variation in supply side constraints to reside

networks in the modern economy mexican migrants in the u s labor market this paper attempts to identify job networks among mexican migrants in the u s labor market the empirical analysis uses data on migration patterns and labor market outcomes based on a sample of individuals belonging to multiple origin communities in mexico over a long period of time each community s network is measured by the proportion of the sampled individuals who are located at the destination the united states in any year we verify that the same individual is more likely to be employed and to hold a higher paying nonagricultural job when his network is exogenously larger by including individual fixed effects in the employment and occupation regressions and by using rainfall in the origin community as an instrument for the size of the network at the destination

the educational and labor market returns to preschool attendance in austria preschool attendance is widely recognized as a key ingredient for later socioeconomic success mothers labor market participation and leveling the playing field for children from disadvantaged backgrounds however the empirical evidence for these claims is still relatively scarce particularly in europe using data from the 2011 austrian european union statistics of income and living conditions eu silc we contribute to this literature by studying the effects of having attended preschool for the adult austrian population we find strong and positive effects of preschool attendance on later educational attainment the probability of working full time hourly wages and the probability that the mother is in the labor market full time workers at the bottom and the top of the distribution benefit less than those in the middle women in particular benefit more in terms of years of schooling and the probability of working full time other disadvantaged groups second generation migrants people with less educated parents also often benefit more in terms of education and work

child care costs and family labor supply this paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the effects of child care costs on family labor supply and the demand for market child care the model is a framework for cross section estimation of the effects of child care costs on labor supply and child care use it applies to households having young children requiring continuous care and in which both the mother and 1 other potential child care provider are present the 3 potential sources of child care are the mother the potential informal provider and the market using data from the 1980 baseline household survey of the employment opportunity pilot projects this empirical analysis uses a subsample of 6170 households in which there is a married woman under age 45 with her spouse present at the time of the survey at least 1 child under age 14 and nonmissing data on key variables results show that 1 higher market child care costs discourage women from working even when an informal source of care is available indicating that such informal care is an imperfect substitute for market care 2 a higher wage rate for the mother encourages her to work thus a higher wage rate increases the probability of using market child care 3 the number of children requiring care has a negative impact on the probability of the women working with the largest impact caused by younger children 4 nonwage income has a negative impact on the probability of the woman working and 5 black women are more likely to work than whites and are statistically more likely than whites to use market child care if they do work this family labor supply model predicts that the cost of market child care will affect household decisions on labor supply and child care use estimates of a qualitative choice model provide strong confirmation that child care costs affect such decisions the responsiveness of the labor supply of mothers to child care costs demonstrated in this study indicate that such subsidies do have their intended effect of encouraging labor supply the fact that a large proportion of current child care subsidies benefit primarily middle and upper income families via the income tax credit suggests that the labor supply effets of such subsidies may in practice be stronger for less needy families than for low income families employer subsidized child care may become an increasingly popular tool for attracting mothers into the labor force

a structural model of labor supply and child care demand this paper specifies and estimates a structural model in which the decision to purchase market child care and the quality purchased is made simultaneously with the employment decision of the mother separate analyses are performed for married mothers and single mothers the structural estimates are used to simulate the effects and costs of changes in the federal child care tax credit the simulations indicate that a refundable child care tax credit would distribute child care benefits more equally across the population by increasing the shares of subsidies received by low income families and would induce a considerable increase in expenditures on market child care labor supply also increases but by considerably less than child care expenditures a surprising result is that despite large increases in child care

public schooling for young children and maternal labor supply as policy makers have sought to reduce the welfare rolls by increasing labor supply among single mothers much attention has been given to the possible role of expanded child care subsidies including direct provision of public preschool at the same time public interest in child care subsidies for two parent households is high for example former vice president gore not long ago proposed to make high quality pre school fully available to every family for every child in every community in america albert gore 1999 in this paper i use 1980 census data to estimate the effect of public school enrollment for a woman s five year old on measures of labor supply and public assistance receipt this approach has two advantages first i am able to estimate the effect of a large implicit child care subsidy 1 second because public kindergarten is universally available to all age eligible children where it is provided selection problems related to means testing do not arise a difficulty with public school enrollment arises because parents may choose to hold their children back a year or enroll them in private school i deal with this issue by using five yearold s quarter of birth qob variables as instruments for public school enrollment status this strategy works because parents ability to enroll a child in public kindergarten in the academic year when the child turns five typically depends on the calendar date of the child s birth 2 in most states children born in the second quarter april 1 june 30 of 1974 will have been eligible to start kindergarten in the fall of 1979 while children born in the first quarter january 1march 31 of 1975 generally will not eligibility for children born between july 1 and december 31 1974 depends on the rules where they live 3

preschool and maternal labour market outcomes evidence from a regression discontinuity design in developing countries employment rates for mothers with young children are relatively low this study analyzes how maternal labor market outcomes in argentina are affected by the preschool attendance of their children using pooled household surveys we show that 4 year olds with birthdays on june 30 have sharply higher probabilities of preschool attendance than children born on july 1 given enrollment age rules regression discontinuity estimates using this variation suggest that preschool attendance of the youngest child in the household increases the probability of full time employment and weekly hours of maternal employment we find no effect of preschool attendance on maternal labor outcomes for children who are not the youngest in the household

revising our thinking about the relationship between maternal labor supply and preschool many argue that childcare costs limit the labor supply of mothers though existing evidence has been mixed using a child s eligibility for public kindergarten in a regression discontinuity instrumental variables framework i estimate how use of a particular subsidy public school affects maternal labor supply i find public school enrollment increases only the employment of single mothers without additional young children i compare this result to previous work focusing on striking increases in a similar setting but earlier period gelabch 2002 differences in the population of mothers labor supply and patterns of lifecycle events likely drive the discrepancy in results

early kindergarten maternal labor supply and children s outcomes evidence from italy abstract we analyze a reform that introduced early access to subsidized childcare for 2 year old children in italy exploring the effects on several measures of maternal labor supply and on children s cognitive outcomes our identification strategy exploits discontinuities in the eligibility rules and the staggered implementation of the reform we find that the policy increased mothers participation in the labor market and lowered the reservation wage of the unemployed thus increasing their likelihood of finding a job at the same time the newly introduced childcare arrangement did not affect children s cognitive development irrespective of their family background