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Mothers’ employment and child care choices across the European Union
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- Published: 02 May 2019
Cebrián, I., Davia, M. Á., Legazpe, N. and Moreno, G. (2019): Mother’s Employment and Child Care Choices across the European Union, Social Science Research (on-line first), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2019.02.003
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to analyse cross-country differences in the maternal employment patterns and the demand for formal and informal child care as interrelated decisions across Europe. We explore a sample of preschoolers and their mothers drawn from the EU-SILC (2005–2013) in a set of 11 EU countries with different institutional settings. The analytical strategy – a set of simultaneous tobit models – allows for mutual interdependencies across decisions. The results vary across welfare regimes and are related to the public provision of child care as well as other dimensions of the institutional context and values. We have found complementarities between paid employment and child care while formal and informal care are shown to be mutual substitutes, even in countries where the provision of external, formal child care is very extended and child care does not depend much on families. This means that the mere expansion of public child care is not enough to improve maternal employment rates. Other institutional aspects of the labour market and societal values also need to be taken into account in this endeavour.
Education, age and skills: An analysis using PIAAC data
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- Published: 02 May 2019
Calero, J., Murillo Huertas, I.P. and Raymond Bara, J.L. (2019): Education, age and skills: An analysis using PIAAC data, European Journal of Education, 1-21, https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12318
Abstract
The main aim of this article is to analyse the change of adult skills, as captured by cognitive skills assessed in PIAAC, across age cohorts, taking into account that the quality of schooling may change from one cohort to another. We estimate a model that relates numeracy and literacy skills to age, schooling, gender and variables related to both family background and labour market performance. The specification allows us to control for changes in the efficiency of the transformation of schooling into skills when drawing age‐skill profiles. Our results show that the effect of ageing on skills, once isolated from cohort effects related to schooling, decreases monotonically across consecutive cohorts. The change of the efficiency of the transformation of schooling into both numeracy and literacy skills shows a remarkably similar pattern. Nonetheless, this change differs substantially between education levels, with the efficiency of the transformation of schooling into skills showing a steadier profile for intermediate than for higher education. Finally, empirical evidence is provided for the decomposition of the differences in the skill levels of the older vs. the prime age generations. The results suggest that the progressive expansion of schooling across younger generations partially offsets the negative effect of the irrepressible ageing of society on skills.