During the last years countries all over the world have started to invest in affordable public child care to support women reconciling work and family life and thus to approach gender equality in labor markets. While much scientific literature focuses on the impact of child care provision on general maternal employment and wages, not much is known about the impact of public child care on more specific aspects of mothers’ labor force participation such as their career choice or professional development.

To shed light on this topic, we combine county-level data on child care coverage with the social security data from the Institute of Employment Research in Nuremberg. We then estimate a generalized Difference-in-Differences model which exploits temporal as well as spatial variation in child care coverage in West German counties after several policy initiatives starting in 2005.

This project is joint work with Dr. Katrin Huber from University of Potsdam, who completed her doctoral studies in 2019 at the University of Passau.