As many developed countries enact policies that allow children to begin universal childcare earlier, understanding how starting universal childcare earlier affects children’s cognitive and noncognitive skills is an important policy question. We provide comprehensive evidence on the multidimensional short- and longer-run effects of starting universal childcare earlier using a fuzzy discontinuity in the age at starting childcare in Germany. Combining rich survey and administrative data, we follow one cohort from age 6 to 15 and examine standardized cognitive test scores, noncognitive skill measures, and school track choice in a unified framework. Children who start universal childcare four months earlier around age 3 do not perform differently in terms of standardized cognitive test scores, measures of noncognitive skills, school track choice, or school entrance examinations. We also find no evidence of skill improvements for children with low socioeconomic status, although we provide suggestive evidence that they may benefit from high-quality care. Our estimates refer to children who start childcare before they become legally entitled, for whom the literature would predict low gains to starting childcare earlier. We provide further evidence on this relationship between parental resistance to and children’s potential gains from childcare. Simply allowing children to start universal childcare earlier is hence not sufficient to improve children’s skill development, particularly for children with low socioeconomic status.

This paper examines the effects of substantial changes in paid parental leave on child development and socio-economic development gaps. We analyse a German reform that replaced a means-tested with an earnings-related benefit scheme. Higher-income households benefited relatively more from the reform than low-income households. The reform expanded paid leave in the first year, while it removed paid leave in the second year after childbirth. We compare children born around the eligibility cut-off on January 1st 2007 and contrast them with children from the preceding, unaffected cohort within a difference-in-differences approach. The analysis is based on administrative data from mandatory school entrance examinations containing detailed child development assessments at age six. Our precise and robust estimates reveal no effects of the changes in parental leave benefits on child development across various socio-economic groups, and consequently no effects on socio-economic development gaps. However, based on administrative employment data, we document substantial effects on maternal employment and family income. The paper concludes that reform effects on today’s mothers are not sacrificed by increases in SES gaps of the future workforce.

Studies examining the introduction of pictorial warnings on cigarette packages provide inconclusive evidence due to small samples and methodological issues. We use individual-level panel data from Australia to examine the association between pictorial warnings and smoking behaviour – prevalence, quitting, initiating and relapsing. The pictorial warnings were accompanied by a reference to a smoking cessation helpline and supportive television commercials. Applying an event study framework, we show that the reform reduced smoking rates by around 4% within the first year of the policy. The effect decreases with age, is similar for men and women, and is slightly larger for low-educated compared to high-educated individuals. The reform permanently lowered smoking rates primarily due to increased quitting in the year of the reform. Thus, pictorial warnings combined with a reference to a smoking cessation helpline and supportive media campaigns are an important tobacco control measure to reduce the social costs of smoking.

We examine how a paid parental leave reform causally affected families’ living arrangements. The German reform we examine replaced a means-tested benefit with a universal transfer paid out for a shorter period. Combining a regression discontinuity with a difference-in-differences design, we find that the reform increased the probability that a newborn lives with non-married cohabiting parents. This effect results from a reduced risk of single parenthood among women who gained from the reform. We reject the economic independence hypothesis and argue that the reform effects for those who benefited from the reform are consistent with hypotheses related to the improved financial situation of new mothers after the reform and increased paternal involvement in childcare.

Few papers examine the pecuniary and non-pecuniary determinants of doctors' labour supply despite substantial predicted shortages in many OECD countries. We contribute to the literature by applying both a structural discrete choice and a reduced-form approach. Using detailed survey data for Australian physicians, we examine how these different modelling approaches affect estimated wage elasticities at the intensive margin. We show that all modelling approaches predict small negative wage elasticities for male and female General Practitioners (GPs) and specialists. Our detailed subgroup analysis does not reveal particularly strong responses to wage increases by any specific group. We show that the translog and Box-Cox utility functions outperform the quadratic utility function. Exploiting the advantages of the structural discrete choice model, we examine short-term effects at the intensive margin by calculating labour supply changes in response to 5 and 10% wage increases. The results show that such wage increases substantially reduce the full-time equivalent supply of male GPs, and to a lesser extent of male specialists and female GPs, but not of female specialists.

An important, yet unsettled, question in public health policy is the extent to which unemployment causally impacts mental health. The recent literature yields varying findings, which are likely due to differences in data, methods, samples, and institutional settings. Taking a more general approach, we provide comparable evidence for four countries with different institutional settings—Australia, Germany, the UK, and the United States—using a nonparametric bounds analysis. Relying on fairly weak and partially testable assumptions, our paper shows that unemployment has a significant negative effect on mental health in all countries. Our results rule out effects larger than a quarter of a standard deviation for Germany and half a standard deviation for the Anglo‐Saxon countries. The effect is significant for both men and women and materialises already for short periods of unemployment. Public policy should hence focus on early prevention of mental health problems among the unemployed.

Providing mothers with access to paid parental leave may be an important public policy to improve child and maternal health. Using extensive information from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, we estimate how paid parental leave entitlements influence children's health up to age 7. Exploiting detailed information on children's health, family background, mothers’ pre‐birth work histories and mothers’ health behaviours during pregnancy, we show that paid parental leave entitlements go together with a reduced probability of a child having multiple ongoing health conditions, but show no significant correlation with any single condition. We find that the reduction in multiple conditions is strongest for children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Our study implies that the provision of paid parental leave for short periods is unlikely to substantially improve child health on average, but may potentially benefit the health of more disadvantaged children.

We examine the size and determinants of the family earnings gap for Australian general practitioners (GPs). Female GPs with children earn more than $30,000 less than comparable female GPs without children, while male GPs with children earn more than $45,000 more than comparable male GPs without children. The main determinants of the family gap are differences in observable characteristics such as working hours, labor‐force attachment, and demographics, and additionally, for men, entrepreneurship and practice size. A fixed‐effects extension of the analysis confirms both the carer effect of children on female GPs and the breadwinner effect of children on male GPs.

We examine the effects of smoking bans on self‐assessed health in Germany taking into account heterogeneities by smoking status, gender and age. We exploit regional variation in the dates of enactment and dates of enforcement across German federal states. Using data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel, our difference‐in‐differences estimates show that non‐smokers' health improves, whereas smokers report no or even adverse health effects in response to bans. We find statistically significant health improvements especially for non‐smokers living in households with at least one smoker. Non smokers' health improvements materialise largely with the enactment of smoking bans. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Daylight savings time represents a public good with costs and benefits. We provide the first comprehensive examination of the welfare effects of the spring and autumn transitions for the UK and Germany. Using individual-level data and a regression discontinuity design, we estimate the effect of the transitions on life satisfaction. Our results show that individuals in both the UK and Germany experience deteriorations in life satisfaction in the first week after the spring transition. We find no effect of the autumn transition. We attribute the negative effect of the spring transition to the reduction in the time endowment and the process of adjusting to the disruption in circadian rhythms. The effects are particularly strong for individuals with young children in the household. We conclude that the higher the shadow price of time, the more difficult is adjustment. Presumably, an increase in flexibility to reallocate time could reduce the welfare loss for individuals with binding time constraints.

Recent studies examining the effect of family income on child health have been unable to account for the endogeneity of income. Using data from a British cohort study, we address this gap by exploiting exogenous variation in local labour market characteristics to instrument for family income. We estimate the causal effect of family income on different measures of child health and explore the role of potential transmission mechanisms. We find that income has a very small but significant causal effect on subjective child health and no significant effect on chronic health conditions, apart from respiratory illnesses. Using the panel structure, we show that the timing of income does not matter for young children. Moreover, our results provide further evidence that parental health does not drive a spurious relationship between family income and child health. Our study implies that financial transfers are unlikely to deliver substantial improvements in child health.