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Do parents work more when children start school? Evidence from the Netherlands

Author

Listed:
  • Lisette Swart
  • Wiljan van den Berge

    (CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis)

  • Karen van der Wiel

Abstract

When children start school, parents save time and/or money. In this paper, we empirically examine the impact of these changes to the family's budget constraint on parents' working hours. Labor supply is theoretically expected to increase for parents who used to spend time taking care of their children, but to decrease for fulltime working parents because of an income effect: child care expenses drop. We show that the effect of additional time dominates the income effect in the Netherlands, where children start school (kindergarten) for approximately 20 hours a week in the month that they turn 4. Using detailed administrative data on all parents, we find that the average mother's hours worked increases by 3% when her youngest child starts going to school. For their partners, who experience a much smaller shock in terms of time, the increase in hours worked is also much smaller at 0.4%.

Suggested Citation

  • Lisette Swart & Wiljan van den Berge & Karen van der Wiel, 2019. "Do parents work more when children start school? Evidence from the Netherlands," CPB Discussion Paper 392, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    • Handle: RePEc:cpb:discus:392
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Kaufmann, Katja Maria & Özdemir, Yasemin & Ye, Han, 2022. "Spillover Effects of Old-Age Pension across Generations: Family Labor Supply and Child Outcomes," IZA Discussion Papers 15388, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Selina Gangl & Martin Huber, 2021. "From homemakers to breadwinners? How mandatory kindergarten affects maternal labour market outcomes," Papers 2111.14524, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2022.
    3. Gangl, Selina & Huber, Martin, 2021. "From homemakers to breadwinners? How mandatory kindergarten affects maternal labour market attachment," VfS Annual Conference 2019 (Leipzig): 30 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall - Democracy and Market Economy 203636, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association, revised 2021.

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    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
    • J22 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Time Allocation and Labor Supply

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