The Effect of Subsidized Early Child Care on Maternal Labor Supply: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Germany
(joint with Katharina Wrohlich)
This paper uses spatial and temporal variation in county child care availability for children under three year induced by the expansion of public child care in West Germany to analyze the impact of subsidized early childcare provision on maternal labor supply. We imply a general difference-in-differences approach to identify this causal link, controlling for time and county fixed effects, as well as potential determinants of the regional child care availability, since the degree of expansion might not be exogenous. So far, our preliminary results based on two different data sets (SOEP and Microcensus) do not show a significant effect of the differences in child care availability on the county level on the individual probability of mothers to work.