Abstract:
Mothers’ short‐ and longer‐term employment patterns may be influenced by their child’s entry to school. This paper assesses these relationships, adopting an identification strategy that draws upon school entry cut‐off rules, which imply that children whose birthdates are one day apart, but lie on either side of the cut‐off date, can begin school one year apart. We find that this variation has a significant initial impact on mothers’ employment, but this effect quickly disappears, suggesting little evidence of longer‐term employment impacts of mothers’ absence from the workforce when they have young children.