Abstract:  This study examined how the 2013 expansion of public preschool to all five-year-olds in Bangladesh affected divisions of labor between men and women in rural households. Research in high-income countries shows that public childcare reduces women's care burdens, increases their labor market participation, and fosters gender-egalitarian divisions of labor at home. Whether these effects extend to rural, low-income settings remains unclear, however. Using data from the 2011 and 2015 Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey, we applied a triple-differences model exploiting variations in preschool expansion intensity across districts, time, and ages of youngest household member to estimate effects on paid and unpaid labor. After the expansion of public preschool in Bangladesh, women's likelihood of working increased, primarily in agriculture and home-based work rather than wage-earning employment. Time-use data showed that after the expansion, women spent less time on housework and more time on income-generating activities, whereas men's time in both paid and unpaid labor remained largely unchanged. Consequently, women's total production time moderately increased and their satisfaction with the household division of labor modestly declined. In rural economies with scarce wage employment and persistent patriarchal norms, public childcare (e.g., universal preschool) can ease women's domestic time burdens and encourage their economic participation, but it does not necessarily transform the gendered organization of childcare and household labor.

Abstract:  This study investigates the employment and family formation effects of South Korea’s 2017 public-sector employment reform, which expanded eligible fixed-term workers’ access to open-ended employment. For affected workers, the reform substantially improved employment security by converting short-term appointments, otherwise subject to termination or uncertain renewal under Korea’s two-year limit on fixed-term employment, into open-ended employment relationships with the same employer. Using newly linked administrative data from 2015 to 2023 and an event-study design exploiting pre-reform variation in institutional exposure, I find that the reform increased retention with the pre-reform baseline employer by 7.8 percentage points and reduced transitions to other employers and to non-employment. It also increased first marriage by 2.7 percentage points and first birth by 1.7 percentage points. These family formation effects are concentrated almost entirely among male workers: the reform increased transitions into fatherhood, but had little effect on transitions into motherhood. Complementary household panel data show that open-ended contract converters experienced a sharp increase in perceived job security relative to fixed-term stayers, while pay, task content, work environment, and career prospects changed little. These results suggest that removing institutional barriers to stable employment can improve workers’ employment security in ways that extend beyond the labor market to marriage and childbearing decisions.

Motivation:  This paper investigates how asymmetric employment protection reforms shaped employment outcomes across Europe. In the 2000s, several countries tightened hiring rules for temporary contracts, while others relaxed them , whereas dismissal protections for permanent workers remained largely unchanged. These uneven adjustments shifted the relative costs of temporary versus permanent employment, creating incentives for firms to substitute between contract types. Using variation in the timing and intensity of these reforms, I provide evidence on their consequences for employment and labor-market duality.

Motivation:  This paper examines how firms respond to binding duration limits on fixed-term contracts (FTCs) in a highly flexible labor market where transitions between contract types are, in theory, relatively easy. I study the UK’s 2002 Fixed-term Regulations, which introduced a 4-year cap on successive FTCs while allowing extensions under a broad “objective justification” clause and left permanent-contract protections largely unchanged. Although the reform imposed a new duration limit, overall employment protection in the UK remained among the weakest in Europe, and the protection gap between permanent and fixed-term contracts was comparatively small. The reform therefore represented only a marginal adjustment within an already highly flexible institutional environment — a point also noted in contemporary commentary . This setting allows me to test whether such a limited regulatory change, introduced in a context where firms face few constraints on contract decisions, could nevertheless alter their contract-renewal behavior or employment-adjustment margins.