School Hours and Maternal Labour Supply: A Natural Experiment from Germany

This paper examines the recent German reform to increase primary school hours and the effect this has had on maternal labour supply. The introduction of Ganztagsschulen, or full day schools, has been one of the largest and most expensive reforms in the German education landscape over the past 15 years, but with little evaluation. While the impetus for the reform came from improving pupils' learning outcomes, it was also motivated by a desire to increase maternal labour supply, which had been traditionally low in Germany as compared to other countries. I exploit the quasi-experimental nature of reform to assess whether or not gaining access to a full day school increases the likelihood that mothers enter into the labor market or extend their working hours if already employed. I use the German Socio-Economic Panel data set (GSOEP) and link it to a school-level data set with geographical information software (GIS). Using a flexible difference-in-difference approach in my estimation of linear probability and logit models, I find that the policy has a statistically significant effect of approximately five percentage points at the extensive margin, drawing more women into the labor market. I find no significant impact of the policy at the intensive margin; women who were already working do not extend their hours and in some cases even shorten them. These results are robust to a variety of checks and comparable to previous findings in the literature on childcare and maternal labor supply. This is one of the few papers, however, to look at the relationship between primary school and maternal labor supply at the level of treatment.