Childcare and maternal employment in Europe : How childcare cost differences among European countries influence the labour force participation of mothers?

Abstract: The aim of this essay is to examine the influence of childcare costs on mother’s employment in European countries. Previous literature indicates that having a child represents a penalty for a woman’s career and integration into the labour market. An empirical analysis has been conducted using the OLS method and cross-national data. We have focused our study on 17 European countries and on data from one particular year.Our findings suggest that a high childcare cost is related to a low maternal employment rate and/or a high share of employed mothers working part-time. As a result, the variations in childcare cost may be partly responsible for the variation in mother’s employment across European countries.The main limitation of this analysis is the small number of observations. Due to the lack of statistical significance of most of the coefficient, we can only suggest a hypothesis that needs to be investigated by further research.