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We examine heterogeneous treatment effects of a universal child care program in Germany by exploiting variation in attendance caused by a reform that led to a large expansion staggered across municipalities. Drawing on novel administrative data from the full population of compulsory school entry examinations, we find that children with lower (observed and unobserved) gains are more likely to select into child care than children with higher gains. Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to attend child care than children from advantaged backgrounds but have larger treatment effects because of their worse outcome when not enrolled in child care.

We study a change in maternity leave entitlements in Norway. Mothers giving birth before July 1, 1977, were eligible for 12 weeks of unpaid leave, while those giving birth after that date were entitled to 4 months of paid leave and 12 months of unpaid leave. The increased time spent with the child led to a 2 percentage point decline in high school dropout rates and a 5 percent increase in wages at age 30. These effects were larger for the children of mothers who, in the absence of the reform, would have taken very low levels of unpaid leave.

The Network on Labour market, economic, and social outcomes of learning (LSO Expert Network) has diligently worked on the selection of indicators for monitoring adult learning policies. Their inaugural theoretical framework on adult learning, published in 2013, covered a broad spectrum of policy areas. This comprehensive scope reflected both the focus of existing data sources and the challenges encountered in data collection efforts. Over the past decade, significant policy shifts have occurred, reshaping adult learning systems both domestically and internationally. Concurrently, there have been improvements in the availability and frequency of data pertaining to adult learning. In response to these developments, this working paper presents an updated theoretical framework on adult learning, aiming to enhance the identification of statistical data concerning adult learning systems and facilitate the selection of pertinent indicators for monitoring purposes. Additionally, the paper offers detailed insights into national priorities and practices within this domain.

We estimate a dynamic model of employment, human capital accumulation—including education, and savings for women in the United Kingdom, exploiting tax and benefit reforms, and use it to analyze the effects of welfare policy. We find substantial elasticities for labor supply and particularly for lone mothers. Returns to experience, which are important in determining the longer-term effects of policy, increase with education, but experience mainly accumulates when in full-time employment. Tax credits are welfare improving in the U.K., increase lone-mother labor supply and marginally reduce educational attainment, but the employment effects do not extend beyond the period of eligibility. Marginal increases in tax credits improve welfare more than equally costly increases in income support or tax cuts.

Research on older workers and retirement has yet to adjust fully to an environment influenced by a combination of demographic change, technological developments and economic recession. A key dimension to the changing relationship between ageing and work is the tension between policies to extend working life and the increasingly fragmented nature of late working life, with the emergence of varied transitions, including: bridge employment, second/third careers, part-time working, early retirement and other variations. These developments indicate both the challenge of conceptualising new forms of work-ending, and – in policy terms – the extent to which these can successfully accommodate longer working lives. The paper provides a critical perspective to the policy of extending working life and the narrative which underpins this approach. The paper argues that retirement has become a ‘contested’ institution in the 21st century, fragmented across different pathways and transitions affecting people in their fifties and sixties. The paper argues the case for improving work quality and security as a precondition for supporting policies for encouraging working in later life. An essential requirement for this will include linking debates on extending working life with technological developments and changes affecting the workplace, creating differentiated paths to retirement and labour force exit, enhancing the provision of training and continuing education, and re-thinking the idea of the ‘older worker’.

We evaluate the consequences of a recent regulatory reform in Portugal, which substantially reduced the cost of firm entry. Our analysis uses matched employer-employee data, which provide unusually rich information on the characteristics of founders and employees associated with new firms before and after the reform. We find that the short-term consequences of the reform were as one would predict with a standard economic model of entrepreneurship: the reform resulted in increased firm formation and employment, but mostly among ' marginal firms' that would have been most readily deterred by existing heavy entry regulations. These marginal firms were typically small, owned by relatively poorly educated entrepreneurs, and operating in low-technology sectors (agriculture, construction and retail trade). In comparison to firms that entered in the absence of the reform, these marginal firms were less likely to survive their first two years.

We estimate the causal effect of parents' education on their children's education and examine the timing of the impact. We identify the causal effect by exploiting the exogenous shift in (parents') education levels induced by the 1972 minimum school leaving age reform in England. Increasing parental education has a positive causal effect on children's outcomes that is evident in preschool assessments at age 4 and continues to be visible up to and including high-stakes examinations taken at age 16. Children of parents affected by the reform attain results around 0.1 standard deviations higher than those whose parents were not impacted.

Despite great focus on and public investment in STEM education, little causal evidence connects quantitative coursework to students’ economic outcomes. I show that state changes in minimum high school math requirements substantially increase black students’ completed math coursework and their later earnings. The marginal student’s return to an additional math course is 10%, roughly half the return to a year of high school, and is partly explained by a shift toward more cognitively skilled occupations. White students’ coursework and earnings are unaffected. Rigorous standards for quantitative coursework can close meaningful portions of racial gaps in economic outcomes.

Over the past few decades of economic reform, China's labor markets have been transformed to an increasingly market-driven system. China has two segregated economies: the rural and urban. Understanding the shifting nature of this divide is probably the key to understanding the most important labor market reform issues of the last decades and the decades ahead. From 1949, the Chinese economy allowed virtually no labor mobility between the rural and urban sectors. Rural-urban segregation was enforced by a household registration system called “hukou.” Individuals born in rural areas receive “agriculture hukou” while those born in cities are designated as “nonagricultural hukou.” In the countryside, employment and income were linked to the commune-based production system. Collectively owned communes provided very basic coverage for health, education, and pensions. In cities, state-assigned life-time employment, centrally determined wages, and a cradle-to-grave social welfare system were implemented. In the late 1970s, China's economic reforms began, but the timing and pattern of the changes were quite different across rural and urban labor markets. This paper focuses on employment and wages in the urban labor markets, the interaction between the urban and rural labor markets through migration, and future labor market challenges. Despite the remarkable changes that have occurred, inherited institutional impediments still play an important role in the allocation of labor; the hukou system remains in place, and 72 percent of China's population is still identified as rural hukou holders. China must continue to ease its restrictions on rural–urban migration, and must adopt policies to close the widening rural–urban gap in education, or it risks suffering both a shortage of workers in the growing urban areas and a deepening urban–rural economic divide.

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.