Events at CERGE-EI

Anna Donina, a PhD student at CERGE-EI, will present in Room 402. You can also attend online via the link below:

Meeting link: https://cerge-ei.webex.com/cerge-ei/j.php?MTID=m1bc906bcb2b1b01e05cf275bea0b53ca
Meeting number: 2744 252 6820
Meeting password: 232546

Presenter: Anna Donina (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

Title: "Essays on Family Policies and Women’s Occupational Choice"

Abstract: How do family policies, such as parental leave and childcare provision, shape women's careers? While these policies are designed to support maternal employment, they may also reshape where women work and how they allocate their human capital. This dissertation examines these mechanisms across three papers, exploiting policy reforms and historical variation in Russia and Europe as sources of identification.

The first paper studies the distributional consequences of targeted childcare expansion using a quasi-natural experiment created by Russia's Presidential Decree No. 599 of 2012. The reform mandated universal kindergarten access for children aged 3–6, but left provision for children aged 0–2 largely unaddressed. In a context of severely constrained capacity, the mandate effectively forced institutions to reallocate scarce kindergarten places toward the targeted age group. Using a difference-in-differences design with RLMS panel data (2008–2018) and exploiting regional variation of childcare expansion, I find that employment among mothers of children aged 0–2 declines by 7 percentage points in treated regions, while unpaid parental leave take-up increases by 28%, suggesting involuntary extensions of leave. Positive employment effects for mothers of 3–6 year-olds (12 percentage points) emerge only after 2015, reflecting a three-year lag in capacity expansion. The results highlight how narrowly targeted childcare policies can benefit the intended group while imposing substantial spillover costs on others.

The second paper takes a broader view of the same supply-side question, examining the effect of childcare availability on maternal employment across all Russian regions. Using cross-regional variation, we find that expanding preschool supply is associated with higher maternal employment, and that the costs of creating additional childcare places are offset by increased tax revenues from employed mothers within two years. To address endogeneity, we instrument contemporary enrollment rates with historical childcare capacity measured in the 1988–1989 USSR Census. IV estimates indicate a causal effect of about 0.7 percentage points per one percentage point increase in enrollment, exceeding OLS estimate and consistent with childcare availability representing a binding supply constraint.

The third paper explores a less-studied consequence of parental leave generosity: horizontal job–education mismatch, defined as employment in an occupation unrelated to one's field of study. Using EU Labour Force Survey data covering 16 countries and 20 parental leave reforms, preliminary estimates suggest that longer leave durations increase field-switching among women relative to men, with substantial heterogeneity across institutional contexts. These findings suggest that generous leave policies may affect not only employment but also the allocation of women's human capital.