Does formal 0-3 years old child care availability boost employment rate of mothers ? Panel data based evidence from Belgium

In 2003, a new multi-annual program aimed at increasing the availability of formal child care for 0-3 year old children was launched in Wallonia, the French-speaking part of Belgium. This paper is interested in evaluating if this increased availability of formal child care resultedin a higher employment rate for women with at least one child under 3. To this end, we use a difference-in-differences approach based on municipality-level panel data, taking advantage of the fact that the increase in availability of formal child care differed greatly across municipalities. We find that the raise in... Mehr ...