Inequality at Home: Fathers’ and Mothers’ Joint Responses to Childcare Expansion

This study investigates how the expansion of public childcare for children under age three in Germany reshaped parental labor dynamics. We show that as mothers increased their labor supply in response to greater childcare availability, fathers adjusted correspondingly: they reduced their days worked and substantially increased parental leave uptake. Strikingly, fathers’ leave-taking closely coincided with mothers’ return to work, underscoring that couples coordinate labor supply and leave-taking decisions. These results reveal how family policies not only support maternal employment but also reshape fathers’ behavior, with important implications for gender equality within households. Public childcare expansion is a key family policy designed to ease the childcare burden on mothers and help them return to work. Consequently, existing research has predominantly focused on mothers, yielding mixed results (Carta and Rizzica, 2018; Andresen and Havnes, 2019; Kleven et al., 2019; Attanasio et al., 2022). However, parents make joint decisions. Thus, the current state of the literature leaves policymakers underinformed about how childcare affects labor supply at the household level. While Andresen and Havnes (2019), Krapf et al. (2020) and Brewer et al. (2022) examine the effects of public childcare on fathers’ labor supply, they produce mixed results and provide a limited understanding of other outcomes. Considering that Zoch and Schober (2018) found that early childcare expansion led mothers to adopt less traditional gender attitudes, it is plausible that fathers adjust their behavior in response to the policy. In this paper, we assess the effects of childcare expansion for children under three on fathers’ labor market outcomes, as well as the joint effects on within-household labor supply. Along with substantial positive effects on labor supply for mothers, we show that fathers also react by coordinating their parental leave accordingly. We conduct a generalized difference-in-difference estimation exploiting county-level and temporal variation in childcare expansion. Using rich administrative data from Germany, we find that early childcare expansion in Germany induced fathers to reduce their labor supply through increased parental leave take-up. Specifically, we find that fathers coordinated with their partner by taking parental leave around the time when mothers return to work. However, as fathers mostly take only the two months of leave reserved for them, this short interruption does not significantly affect their earnings. This study provides novel evidence that the expansion of early public childcare can reduce the gender gap in labor market outcomes and childcare involvement through increased take-up of fathers’ parental leave.