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What role does affordable and widely available public child care play for fertility? We exploit a major German reform generating large temporal and spatial variation in child care coverage for children under the age of three. Our precise and robust estimates on birth register data reveal that increases in public child care have significant positive effects on fertility. The fertility effects are more pronounced at the intensive than at the extensive margin, and are not driven by changes in the timing of births or selective migration. Our findings inform policy makers concerned about low fertility by suggesting that universal early child care holds the promise of being an effective means of increasing birth rates.

This study presents empirical estimates of the effects of local public kindergarten availability on the employment rate of mothers of preschool-aged children in the Czech Republic. It brings together data from the Population Census and School Register to form a unique database describing the demand for childcare (numbers of children aged 3–5) and supply (capacity) across more than 6,000 Czech municipalities between 2001 and 2011. We take advantage of variations in kindergarten availability over time to estimate the impact on maternal employment with a first differences model. Our estimates show that a 10 percentage point increase in the availability of kindergarten places led to a 0.2–0.4 percentage point increase in the employment rate of mothers of preschool-aged children. A drop in the availability of kindergarten places between 2001 and 2011 resulted in 9,000 fewer mothers being employed and a net loss to public finances of 1.2–1.7 billion CZK per year.

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is seen as a crucial element of the social investment state. Whilst the extent of social investment in ECEC depends on financial expenditure, its effectiveness depends on certain conditions being met: namely, affordable, high quality provision being available. We explore policy development and the role played by government in the funding, provision and regulation of ECEC in England, France and Germany and then compare availability, affordability and quality. We argue that for children aged three and over, social investment can be deemed to be broadly effective in France and Germany, but in England quality is compromised by low staff qualification levels in private childcare centres. For children under three, effective social investment is elusive in all countries, although as a result of different conditions not being met. Our findings lead us to question the limitations of the concept of social investment in ECEC, particularly in marketised contexts.

Public childcare provision and female labor force participation (FLP) have strongly increased over the past decades in European societies. However, studies offer heterogeneous findings on the link between public childcare and FLP. We investigate the link between public childcare and FLP, using different indicators of childcare and accounting for heterogeneous time trends and regional heterogeneity. Based on a balanced panel of all German counties from 2007 to 2017, we estimate the effect of an increasing enrollment rate for children aged 0-2 and 3-5 on FLP. We compare fixed effect (FE) and fixed effect individual slope estimators (FEIS) to control for county-specific time trends. Subsequently, we compare the results across regions with different levels of urbanization. We find that most FE results are biased due to selection on trends. Still, when accounting for selection on trends, childcare enrollment for the age group 0-2 increases FLP in West Germany and in urban areas. Furthermore, childcare enrollment for children aged 3-5 years is associated with higher FLP in West Germany, in rural and, most strongly, in metropolitan areas. Our study highlights important heterogeneity in the general time trends of FLP and the effectiveness of childcare arrangements across different regions in Germany.

The estimated effect of childcare availability on maternal labor supply varies highly in previous single-country estimates. We provide comparable quasi-experimental estimates of the childcare effect for seven countries, using harmonized data and a uniform method based on country-specific childcare eligibility cutoffs. We evaluate the estimates in light of key institutional factors to determine under what conditions childcare expansion is likely to be effective. We propose a measure that captures childcare scarcity and predicts the effectiveness of childcare expansion: the gap between the participation rate of mothers with older children (aged 6–14) and childcare coverage under the age of 3. In countries with a high gap, we find that childcare availability has a significant positive impact on maternal labor supply (Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic). No significant impact is found in countries where the gap is low due to either already high childcare coverage (France) or the low participation of mothers with older children (Greece, Italy). We discuss other policies that need to be addressed concurrently for childcare expansion to achieve its goal of increasing mothers’ participation in the labor market.

Subsidized childcare is a key instrument to support maternal employment in most OECD countries. Using a major reform implemented in Luxembourg in 2009, I study the effects of expanding access to subsidized childcare on the employment decisions of women in a context where childcare is universal and heavily subsidized, but is limited by capacity constraints. The identification strategy relies on temporal variation across age groups of children. In response to the reform, the employment rate of mothers increased by 3 percentage points, and their working time grew by 1 h per week. This effect hides the difference between children’s ages, as mothers of the youngest children are found to be more responsive to the reform than mothers of children in primary education. Studying heterogeneous effects reveals a differential impact of the reform with regard to prior employment status.

Applying work by Green and Henseke (in IZA J Labor Policy 5(1):14, 2016a), this study examines changes in the German graduate labour market in the twenty-first century. To do so, it deploys a new statistically derived indicator of graduate jobs, based on job skill requirements obtained from worker-reported task data in the German Employment Surveys 2006 and 2012. As in previous work, the resulting classifier explains differences in graduate labour market outcomes better than existing methods and can be applied in a range of contexts where intelligence on graduate destinations is desired. It is supplied in the appendix of this study. Despite the expansion of higher educational attainment between 1999 and 2012, my analysis indicates a rising excess demand for graduate labour. Following key findings emerge: • Graduate skills are required beyond the narrow range of professions. Work tasks associated with cognitive skills use are key determinants of higher education requirements on the job. • The proportion of graduates in the age bracket 25–34 has risen among men from 14.7 to 18.9% and from 13.3 to 22.5% among women between 1999 and 2012. Young women have become the group with greatest level of higher education in the labour market. • The growing supply of graduate labour in the age bracket 25–34 was surpassed by the expansion of employment in graduate jobs. The employment share of graduate jobs shifted by 17 percentage points to almost 30% among young women and by 11 percentage points to 28% among young men. • Among young female graduates, the incidence of underemployment fell to 22% between 1999 and 2012; roughly comparable to the level among males at the same ages. Prime aged female graduates, however, experience above average rates of underemployment. • A sharp rise of the pay premium associated with higher education among men contrasts with stagnating wage differentials among women. • The pay penalty associated with underemployment has not changed statistically significantly.

Ärzte zählen zu den Topverdienern in unserer Gesellschaft. Trotzdem sehen die ärztlichen Standesorganisationen ihre Mitglieder als nicht angemessen vergütet an. Aus Sicht der Krankenkassen geht es demgegenüber weniger um eine „Einkommensgarantie“ für die Vertragsärzte als um die Sicherung der Versorgung ihrer Versicherten. Im Mittelpunkt dieses Streits steht letztendlich die Frage nach dem \"gerechten Lohn\".

This paper proposes and estimates a model of demand for and supply of graduations in tertiary education, which is then used to construct forward-looking scenarios for graduation rates by country. Consistent with evidence that economic returns to education have remained high in spite of rising educational attainment levels, the paper accords a great deal of attention to developments in gross earnings at various levels of the earnings distribution, though other factors are also accounted for. The analysis shows that demand for tertiary graduations increases in per capita incomes, wage differentials between high and medium earners, and PISA scores. Supply of graduations increases in tuitions and (to a lesser extent) government funding, but also in the share of students enrolled in private institutions and PISA scores. Based on the OECD 50-year scenarios for per capita incomes and earning inequalities (Braconier et al., 2014), the estimated model is used to generate future scenarios of demand for tertiary education, pointing to increases between 30 and 60 per cent across OECD countries over the coming 50 years. Such large increases in demand would put pressure on the supply, either requiring substantial additional government spending or a major shift towards tuition funding across OECD countries. (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku).