Child care in the United States is usually described as a fragmented system, where public programs interact with private organizations to supply childcare services. In this paper, I analyze the effects of an expansion of subsidized childcare for low-income 4-year-old children, the North Carolina Pre-Kindergarten Program (NCPK), on the enrollment of 0-4-year-old children. I combine rich data from administrative records with a design that exploits geographical and temporal variation in the NCPK rollout. I found that, when joining the program, NCPK centers enrolled more children and reorganized their structure to serve more eligible children. Nearby childcare facilities also enrolled more four- and three-year-olds, particularly in lower-income areas. This is most likely explained by the displacement of ineligible children from NCPK to non-NCPK centers. The results suggest that the policy increased childcare access for low-income families and led to a reallocation of children to centers, increasing economic segregation across centers.

Parental leave is one of the most important policies that shape the post-birth careers of women. We exploit a sequence of parental leave reforms in Germany that extended both the job protection period and the duration of parental leave benefits to different extents to study the effects of the two policy instruments parental leave consists of. Using administrative social security data, we first replicate the stylized facts that mothers respond to extensions in parental leave and that the average effect of longer leave-taking on their careers is negative. Second, holding constant the length of mothers' post-birth labor market break, we show that extending job protection significantly reduces losses in long-run earnings while extensions of the benefit duration have no measurable impact. The positive effect of employment protection works both by enhancing employer continuity as well as by improving outside opportunities for mothers who change their employer.

We assess the impact of daycare enrollment on how housework and childcare are shared between mothers and fathers. Utilizing survey data from a Japanese municipality and observing all key variables influencing daycare enrollment, we employ a quasi-experimental approach to infer causal relationships. Our findings reveal that daycare enrollment leads to greater involvement by fathers in housework and childcare, concurrently with a reduction in mothers' participation in these areas. Notably, the shift in household labor dynamics appears to stem primarily from a direct influence of daycare enrollment on fathers' behavior, rather than from an increase in maternal employment.