Please note this seminar time is from 1.30 to 3pm.

This study utilises newly constructed municipality-level data covering 1,792 municipalities in Japan for 2000, 2005, and 2010 to estimate the effect of daycare accessibility on employment of mothers with children aged 0-5 years. We instrument each municipality’s quota of licensed daycare centers relative to the population aged 0-5 years with that municipality’s land price to address potential endogeneity concerns. Our findings suggest that the average increase in maternal employment rate resulting from a 10% improvement in daycare accessibility is in the order of +4.8-5.6 per cent. Around 600,000 stay-at-home mothers could enter the labor market if municipalities with low daycare accessibility expand their daycare capacities.