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IZA Discussion Paper No. 17969
June 2025
A Matter of Time? Measuring Effects of Public Schooling Expansions on Families

We leverage pronounced changes in the availability of public schooling for young children---through duration expansions to the kindergarten day---to better understand how an implicit childcare subsidy affects mothers and families. Exploiting full-day kindergarten variation across place and time from 1992 through 2022 and novel data on state-level policy changes, combined with a comparison of children of typical kindergarten age to older children, we measure effects on parental labor supply and family childcare expenses. Results suggest that families are responsive to these shifts. Full-day kindergarten expansions were responsible for as much as 24 percent of the growth in employment of mothers with kindergarten-aged children in this time frame.

Communications
Mark Fallak
mark.fallak@liser.lu
+352 585-855-526
World of Labour
Olga Nottmeyer
olga.nottmeyer@liser.lu
+352 585-855-501
Network Coordination
Christina Gathmann
christina.gathmann@liser.lu

The IZA@LISER Network is a global community of scholars dedicated to excellence in labor economics and related fields, now coordinated at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) following its transition from Bonn.

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