In most OECD countries, subsidised childcare is a key instrument to support maternal employment. Using a large reform implemented in Luxembourg in 2009, I study the effect of expanding access to subsidised childcare on childcare and employment decisions of women in a context where childcare is universal and heavily subsidised, but bound by capacity constraints. The identification relies on temporal variation across child age groups. The results show that, in response to the reform, the employment rate of mothers increased by 4-7 percentage points and their hours of work by around 3 hours per week. Studying heterogeneous effects reveals a differential impact of the reform for more vulnerable mothers. Parents whose youngest child is under the age of 3 are found to use more daycare services, for longer hours, while the use of informal care remains unchanged. These results suggest that there is no crowding out effect of the new policy.

This report studies working time and competitiveness. The first part of the report compares working time in Finland to other European countries using working time data from Eurostat and provides a review of the economics literature on working time and employment. The second part of the report studies the impact of the Competitiveness Pact on employment and Finnish competitiveness using Etla’s macro model. This analysis separates the impact of working time extension and social security contributions and taxation on employment.

This research examines Irish data collected over more than a decade to investigate involvement in unpaid work in the areas of childcare, care of older adults or those with a disability, and housework. It was funded by the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission.

The study finds that adults in Ireland spend an average of 16 hours per week on caring and 14.5 hours on housework. The time spent on caring and housework combined is the third highest in the EU. On average, women in Ireland spend double the time of men on caring and more than twice as much time on housework.