Legal right to childcare and maternal employment in Finland

Abstract

This paper studies the relationship between childcare access and maternal employment in the context of Finland’s 2016 childcare reform. The reform reduced access to municipally provided childcare for parents who were not both studying or working full-time. This paper uses a difference-in-differences approach to estimate the effects of the childcare reform on the employment and annual income of affected mothers. The results do not indicate any signif-icant effect on the labour market outcomes of mothers. Heterogeneity analysis does not find any subgroups whose outcomes were especially affected by the reform.