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This paper examines the differential effect of a computerized, non-compulsory supplementary practice tool in a sample of first-year secondary students (N = 355) using an experimental design. Additionally, students’ practice behavior and its association with teacher factors were investigated. The results show that the practice tool was variably effective across the skill distribution of children and distinct mathematics domains (numbers, proportions and measurement). The practice tool proved particularly effective for low-achievers, who significantly benefited from the practice tool in all mathematics domains. For middle-achievers benefits were only observed in the domain of proportions. Furthermore, it is shown that a significant part of the variance in students’ practice behavior is explained by teacher factors. Therefore, the results indicate that for maximum efficiency students may be given selective access to domains and teachers need to incentivize the students to practice on a regular basis.

Community schools aim to enhance pupils’ cognitive and social-emotional skills. They differ from traditional schools by a more intense cooperation with parents and institutions in their neighbourhood and by offering multiple extracurricular activities. However, empirical evidence on the contribution of community schools to educational achievement is lacking. We use Mahalanobis matching techniques to evaluate the impact of community schools, the budget allocated to them and their activities on pupils’ cognitive and non-cognitive skills. We find that attending a community school as such does not affect pupils’ cognitive or social-emotional skills. Moreover has neither the length of the experience, nor the size of the subsidy a robust effect on cognitive or social-emotional outcomes. However, the data show that specific activities financed with the subsidy do have an effect. For instance, activities directly reinforcing the learning process, the school climate and parental involvement lead to significantly higher cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes.

The main goal of this paper is to unravel the social distribution of childcare policies: who benefi ts from government investment on public childcare? If childcare policies are mainly used by those already working, and (scarce) budgetary resources thus end up with the higher income brackets, genuine concern arises about the distributional consequences of childcare policies on the one hand, and its effectiveness as an instrument to activate mothers with young children into the labour market on the other. Answering this question is a complex endeavour, because one has to simultaneously take into account the (possibly income-differentiated) tariff structure of childcare services and private childcare costs (parental fees), government expenditures (subsidies to childcare providers) and tax concessions. In this contribution, we develop a fi ne-grained analysis to reveal the distributional impact of public childcare for two countries (Flanders/Belgium and Sweden) already reaching the Barcelona targets for under 3s and interpret the results in a European perspective. We fi nd that, although both cases report high coverage rates, Sweden and Flanders have very different and even opposite distributional outcomes. Both examples provide us with valuable lessons on the redistributive nature of "new risk policies" and the effectiveness of childcare as an instrument of labour market activation.

The main goal of this paper is to unravel the social distribution of childcare policies: who benefi ts from government investment on public childcare? If childcare policies are mainly used by those already working, and (scarce) budgetary resources thus end up with the higher income brackets, genuine concern arises about the distributional consequences of childcare policies on the one hand, and its effectiveness as an instrument to activate mothers with young children into the labour market on the other. Answering this question is a complex endeavour, because one has to simultaneously take into account the (possibly income-differentiated) tariff structure of childcare services and private childcare costs (parental fees), government expenditures (subsidies to childcare providers) and tax concessions. In this contribution, we develop a fi ne-grained analysis to reveal the distributional impact of public childcare for two countries (Flanders/Belgium and Sweden) already reaching the Barcelona targets for under 3s and interpret the results in a European perspective. We fi nd that, although both cases report high coverage rates, Sweden and Flanders have very different and even opposite distributional outcomes. Both examples provide us with valuable lessons on the redistributive nature of “new risk policies” and the effectiveness of childcare as an instrument of labour market activation.

In this study we examine the collective labor supply choices of dual-earner parents and take into account child care expenditures. We find that the individual labor supplies are hardly affected by changes in the prices of child care services. In addition, the child care price effects on the individual labor supplies are much smaller than the wage effects. Furthermore, we find that the additional earnings due to an increase in household non-labor income minus the child care expenditures are mainly transferred to the female partner.

As a consequence of the rising number of dual-earner households, many contemporary couples in europe face two potentially conflicting job schedules when figuring out how to allocate their time over a week. In this article, we study how dual-earner couples with children organize their working time in belgium, italy, and the netherlands. We place working time coordination explicitly in a comparative framework to allow cross-country differences in time-scheduling mechanisms to be revealed. We define working time coordination as an act that leads to hours of paid work performed by both parents at the same moment and of which the joint nature cannot be explained by factors other than the partners’ potential to communicate on the timing of their work. Our main findings are as follows: (1) parents actively coordinate their working times in all three societies; (2) on average, italian and flemish dual-earner parents tend to synchronize (increase their work-time overlap), which indicates that parents aim at spending non-market time jointly; and (3) dutch dual-earner parents tend to de-synchronize (decrease work-time overlap), which indicates that the latter tend to maximize the amount of time that at least one parent is out of the job.