Proposals for the reform of labour legislation have been central to the reform agenda of international financial institutions, most particularly the World Bank, and have been pressed particularly on the governments of countries which formerly have had socialist or social democratic forms of labour market regulation. This reform agenda is based on a neo-liberal conception of the labour market, a...

This paper studies the e ect of child care subsidies on maternal labour supply. In the Finnish child care system, parents taking care of their children at home receive a relatively generous home care allowance. I use variation arising from changes in municipality speci c supplement to this allowance to identify the causal e ect of subsidies on the labour force participation of mothers. A munici...

Mrs A., aged 27 years, states that she has always enjoyed good health, but according to her mother's account she suffered from "fits "for two years, between 15 and 17 years of age, but after scarlet fever at 17, had never any return of them. She came under my care in April 1879, when she was delivered of her first child. Her labour though protracted was natural, recovery rapid. She nursed her c...

Using the Spanish Household Survey Data, we explore the determinants of the timing of the first child in Spain. Our aim is to determine the impact of income, wages and labour market situation in the decision of entry to motherhood. We estimate a discrete-time duration model, controlling for sample selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity. Our results show that employed women delay their firs...

We analyse why child poverty rates were much higher in Britain than in Western Germany during the 1990s, using a framework that focuses on poverty transition rates. Child poverty exit rates were significantly lower, and poverty entry rates significantly higher, in Britain. We decompose these cross-national differences into differences in the prevalence of ‘trigger events’ (changes from one year...

This is a unique account of working-class childhood during the British industrial revolution. Using more than 600 autobiographies written by working men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Jane Humphries illuminates working-class childhood in contexts untouched by conventional sources and facilitates estimates of age at starting work, social mobility, the extent of apprenticeship, and th...

We show that measurement error in the constructed price of child care can explain why previous Australian studies have found partnered women’s labour supply to be unresponsive to child care prices. Through improved data and improved construction of the child care price variable, we find child care price elasticities that are statistically significant, negative and in line with elasticities foun...