Report on the comparative study on intergenerational transfers and women’s labour force participation

By using data of seven countries drawn from the Gender and Generation Survey, we study the relationship between mother employment and informal childcare provided by grandparents. Whereas intergenerational support encompasses several dimensions, childcare provided by grandparents is of particular interest. In general, we find that mothers’ employment is positively associated with grandparents providing childcare. However, there are important endogeneity issues involved. The key is that preferences of both the middle generation (i.e. the respondent) and the grandparents are unobserved but may impact the outcomes of interest. Moreover, interactions and negotiations taking place between the generations are also unobserved. These kind of endogeneity issues are not well studied nor understood and we provide a preliminary analysis of the issues involved and how to deal with them using simultaneous equations and instrumental variables