This paper studies how public child care affects the quality of mothers' careers in Germany, a setting characterized by low female labor force participation and traditional gender norms. Leveraging administrative data and quasi-experimental variation in child care expansion, we analyze occupational and employer mobility, task content, leadership, and within-firm wage positions. We show that while child care increases maternal employment, its effects on career quality are selective and context-dependent. Improvements are observed in employment in high-skilled occupations involving more complex, non-routine tasks and tend to be more pronounced among mothers in time-flexible occupations and family-friendly firms, highlighting complementarities between public policy and workplace conditions.
We study how artificial intelligence (AI) is related to labour demand at the establishment level. We use the share of AI related vacancy postings at the establishment level to identify activities in developing, implementing or using AI technologies. Low overall AI vacancy shares between 2015 and 2023 suggest that we study a phase of early AI adoption where establishment AI activities are rather associated with discernable changes in skill demand. We find a small reduction in the demand for those hard skills, denoting skills required for the tasks specific to a certain occupational activity, that are not related to AI technologies and that are mainly required to complete analytical non-routine tasks like, e.g., “analysis”, “development”, “software implementation”. We found no overall association with employment growth, nor did we identify any correlation between AI-related activities or different skill groups.
