Public subsidies for institutionalised child care have been a central element of German family politics for the past 15 years. Since January 1st 1996, parents can claim child day care legally for children at least three years of age. In the past few years though, day care for children under the age of three has come more and more to the fore.
The aim of the ex-post-evaluation is to highlight the coherences and present the interdependencies between publicly subsidized child care and the goals of “Compatibility of Family and Job”, “Economic Stability and Social Participation of Families” and „Increase of the Birth-Rate”.
Thanks to the extensive dataset SOEP, one can compare families that make use of institutionalized offers in child day care and families that do not make use of them or maybe even cannot (micro-level, variation on family level).
Among other reasons, this variation can result from the fact that some families living in certain regions (and at certain points in time) dispose over a greater availability of publicly subsidized child care than families in other regions (and at different points in time)(macro-level, regional and timely variation).
SOEP, macro data of the Federal Office of Statistics
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