Search

In this paper we analyze the effect of involving parents in human capital investment. We study the effect of a parental app on student effort in a digital homework practice tool, and its effect on subsequent human capital development. The randomized field experiment includes more than 2000 7-9 grade students of 2 schools and we specifically focus on different socio-economic status (SES) groups. The results indicate that parental involvement via an app positively affects effort and human capital development of 7th and 8th grade students, but not of 9th grade students. The positive effects are mainly driven by low-SES students and are larger for males.

We study how admission policies in higher education affect enrollment decisions of men and women and the decision to apply to STEM programs. More specifically, we investigate how an increase in the relative acceptance probability for STEM programs affects these decisions. We apply our analysis to Hungary and we evaluate a policy reform that limited access to subsidized non-STEM programs. We find that this change in the selectivity of the admission system differently affected application decisions of men and women. After the reform, fewer students applied to higher education and the reform especially discouraged the participation of women. After the reform, more men and women applied to STEM programs or non-subsidized non-STEM programs in which they have to pay tuition fees. This last effect is stronger for women. As the reform affected the chance to be admitted to higher education, we estimate a structural model to analyze how the responsiveness to admission probabilities in application decisions differs between men and women. We find that women are more sensitive to admission probabilities. Finally, we use the model to simulate the impact of alternative admission policies on enrollment in STEM programs. We find that an open access policy in STEM programs would stimulate more men and women to apply to these programs.

This paper aims at the evaluation of the reform of vocational education introduced in 1998 in Hungary. The reform extended the duration of education by one year, and increased teaching time spent on non-vocational subjects. The reform affected two of the three tracks in upper-secondary education in Hungary, vocational secondary school and vocational school. We estimate the effect of the reform on educational attainment, employment and wages in a comparative interrupted time series (CITS) framework, using the academic track and secondary school drop-outs as control groups. The results suggest that the reform has had heterogeneous effects. First, we detect no effect for the vocational secondary track, while the reform has improved labour market outcomes of vocational school students. Second, in the vocational school group the reform has increased men's wages, while not affected their employment. For women we found a positive employment effect, while wages have increased only for the younger cohorts.

This paper describes a dataset with data from three individually randomized educational technology experiments on differentiation, formative testing and feedback during one school year for a group of 8th grade students in the netherlands, using administrative data and the online motivation questionnaire of boekaerts. The dataset consists of pre- and posttest scores for each experiment, as well as background information on the students, such as gender, age, ability, grade repetition and neighborhood characteristics. It also includes motivation of students. The dataset, or parts of it, could be interesting to use in future studies, focusing on effects of the use of educational technology, for comparison with similar and/or slightly different experiments, and for studies such as meta-analyses or replication studies, especially given the individual experimental setup.

Childcare services are increasingly regarded as a major policy lever to mitigate social inequalities. Such services are believed to be effective in reducing poverty and increasing employment rates by allowing both parents to engage in paid employment, as well as to benefit the cognitive and non-cognitive development of young children. This holds in particular for young children from disadvantaged backgrounds, enhancing their future success in education and in the labour market. However, recent studies have shown that the use of formal childcare services is socially stratified, i.e. higher-income families or families with a high-educated mother use childcare services to a much larger extent than lower-income families or families with a low-skilled mother. Due to this social gap in childcare use, government investment in childcare could fail to live up to its inequality-reducing potential or, worse still, may actually exacerbate rather than mitigate social inequalities. Drawing on the comparative social policy literature, this article explores, for the first time, the determinants of inequalities in childcare coverage for a broad set of countries. Our results contribute to a proper understanding of the mechanisms driving inequality in childcare service use, which is crucial to the future of childcare services as an effective policy instrument to mitigate social inequalities in early life.

Alleenstaande moeders vormen een zeer kwetsbare groep in onze samenleving en kampen met een verhoogd armoederisico. De reden daarvoor is tweeledig. Ten eerste hebben alleenstaande moeders per definitie maar een inkomen om rond te komen, terwijl in tijden waarin tweeverdienersschap de norm is een aanvullend inkomen vaak noodzakelijk is om financieel het hoofd boven water te houden. Daarnaast hebben zij het moeilijker om een inkomen te verwerven uit arbeid omdat zij geen partner hebben om op terug te vallen die (ten dele) de zorg voor de kinderen op zich kan nemen. Wanneer alleenstaande moeders niet tewerkgesteld zijn, wordt hun kwetsbaarheid nog pregnanter. Toch is het armoederisico van alleenstaande moeders niet in alle landen even groot. Deze landenverschillen zijn in hoofdzaak te herleiden tot verschillen in tewerkstelling en in sociale bescherming. Eerder onderzoek wees al uit dat vooral kinderbijslagen een efficiënt beleidsinstrument kunnen zijn om armoede te bestrijden, in het bijzonder bij alleenstaande moeders. In dit artikel bouwen we verder op dit inzicht en onderzoeken we in welke mate de financiële toelagen die specifiek gerelateerd zijn aan het hebben van kinderen, kortweg kinderbijslagen, het armoederisico van alleenstaande moeders kunnen verminderen. Hiertoe vergelijken we België met 14 Europese welvaartsstaten, en besteden we bijzondere aandacht aan het ontwerp van het beleid. De betrachting is om te ontrafelen welk kinderbijslagstelsel het meest efficiënt (doelmatig) is in het bestrijden van armoede bij alleenstaande moeders. ispartof: CSB-berichten status: published

Over the past decades, social protection systems in Western welfare states have designed new ways to facilitate the reconciliation of work and family life. Often, the new measures were added to existing family policies and family-dependent taxation rules. This has led to heterogeneous policy mixes relating to caring for children, ranging from support of the working mother (e.g. subsidies for child care) to measures that are aimed at compensating parents for self-provided care efforts (e.g. home-care benefits). This heterogeneity entails complex incentive structures that are not a priori clear. Also, the different policy options are far from distributionally neutral. In this paper, we use EUROMOD to model the policy measures of both types (work support and home care support) in place in three European welfare states with very distinct care policy systems: Finland, Belgium and Germany. Using microsimulation techniques we introduce the Finnish policy set in Belgium and Germany. The distributional consequences of the Finnish allocation of public expenditures for the Belgian and German families and children are investigated. We also try to provide insight into the difference in incentive structure across these three countries.

Single mothers are vulnerable to living in poverty in contemporary European societies, which translates into economic dependency and threatens womens capacity to form autonomous households. Given their difficulties to engage in paid employment in a context of increasing dual earnership, the question how to safeguard the economic status of single mothers is a crucial one. In this article we address this issue by focusing on child benefits and exploring their impact on the poverty risk of single mothers in 15 European countries. In doing so, we combine two methodological traditions and devote specific attention to the design of child benefit systems in Europe which adds to the universality versus targeting-debate. We find that child benefits play a major role in complementing the household income of single mothers but that the poverty-reducing impact differs greatly between countries, depending on the generosity and the design of the benefit system. We also find that designing a single mother-friendly child benefit system does not necessarily come at a great cost. Our results demonstrate that a welldesigned child benefit system has the potential to play a crucial role in strengthening womens autonomy.

This paper investigates how expansion of the supply of childcare is likely to change the use of childcare services and especially the extent to which the social imbalance in its use is corrected. The empirical case at hand is Flanders, the largest region of Belgium, which has a comparatively speaking large offer of formal childcare slots, but continues to struggle with excess demand and uneven access. The latter is crucial for policy makers. Is rationing to be blamed for the underrepresentation of certain social groups in formal childcare or is an explanation to be found in other circumstances such as poor employment prospects or more traditional family values? In this paper we simulate a simple expansion of the number of formal childcare slots and investigate its consequences, in terms of how this expansion affects the use of both formal and informal childcare, keeping all other circumstances constant. We show that a large increase in use can be expected for those groups that are currently underrepresented in the formal childcare sector, even without a change in the mix of subsidised and non-subsidised service providers and without other contextual changes (e.g. maintaining the small monetary gain from paid employment for low-skilled mothers when making use of formal childcare at its current prices). Yet, we also show that while the social gap is narrowed, the childcare sector cannot be expected to close the gap entirely by itself. Furthermore our estimates suggest that the expansion of formal childcare is likely to result in part-time combinations of formal and informal care, rather than in complete crowding-out of informal care.

This paper extends existing theories on parental time investment in children to a three generational setting and discusses identifiable restrictions of alternative explanations for grandparental help with childcare. It shows on data of 10 European countries (taken from the 2004 SHAREsurvey) that earlier empirical work may have mistakenly identified gender variation as an indication of non-altruistic behavior. In fact, grandparental choices can be explained as a response to varying constraints, for instance with regards to the disproportional care needs of lone parents or employed children experiencing rationing in the market for formal care services.

This article introduces the idea of a childcare time benefit that reconciles three ambitions: to reach a high level of labour market participation, to revalue parental childcare time and to enhance the freedom to choose in the reconciliation of work and family life. The proposed benefit is based on the pattern of effective childcare time in society, that declines with the ageing of the children. This decline defines a clear path over time with increasing monetary incentives to (re)turn to the labour market. Furthermore, the benefit is unconditional and, thus, does not direct parents in their choice between parental care and care services. Simulation of first round effects of the benefit on Belgian households suggests a disincentive for life-long retreat from the labour market, while offering monetary gains for homemakers with young children. Moreover, single parents see their poverty risk decline by more than a quarter.

In the last decades, measures to reconcile work and family life arose in response to new societal needs stemming from the generalization of dual earnership. However, dual earnership has not been adopted evenly across various social groups in European societies. Consequently, concerns about the distribution of the benefit of those policies arise: does this new orientation entail a loss of redistributive power of the welfare state? We address this question by focussing on the interaction of three types of family measures and their overall distributional effect in Europe with the Belgian region of Flanders as case in point. We develop a fine-grained analysis to reveal the budgetary impact of the variation in use and generosity, and find that the redistributive effect of child benefits is largely undone by subsidized childcare and parental leave benefits. As such, our analysis supports concern about a reduction of the redistributive character of the new‟ welfare state.

This article argues that the effect of policy institutions on female labor market participation is mediated by reference groups surrounding individual women. Using recent data on individual women between 20 and 49 years in 22 European countries, we distinguish between two types of institutions: public childcare availability and public sector employment. We hypothesize that both institutions are conducive to womens employment but that the effect differs across different social groups. More generally the analysis aims at the identification of good practices, i.e. countries that succeed in shaping women-friendly circumstances on the labor market. By means of a logistic multilevel model, we find that both public childcare and public sector employment are associated with higher female employment chances. We also find that women embedded in different reference groups behave differently on the labor market, that public childcare provision and public sector employment are helpful to raise the odds of employment for lower and medium educated women respectively. Finally, we observe that, ceteris paribus, non-urban areas shape better employment opportunities than urban areas.