Family Policies and Female Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Social Security Records
Publication Date
1-1-2014
Grant Type
Early Career Research Award
Description
This project proposes to estimate the causal effect of family policies on female labor market outcomes. Previous research has focused on different family policies such as maternity leave, child care coverage and the parental allowance separately and estimated the impacts of these policies on various labor market outcomes. In this project, we combine social security records from newly available administrative data and municipal level information on child care provision and father’s parental allowance in Germany to determine the effect of child care availability on the short-term and long-term labor force participation and occupational choice of women. Exploiting the variation across municipalities for these two reforms and comparing the labor market outcomes of women that were giving birth around the timing of the reforms to the control groups, we can identify these effects.