De Quinto, AliciaGonzález Luna, Libertad2025-05-072025-05-072025De Quinto A, González L. The short- and long-term effects of family-friendly policies on mothers' employment. Labour Econ. 2025 Jan;92:102672. DOI: 10.1016/j.labeco.2024.1026720927-5371http://hdl.handle.net/10230/70315Countries often encourage part-time work among new parents as part of their family policies, aiming to foster mothers' labor market attachment. However, this approach may unintentionally impede women's long-term career prospects. We examine the impact of a 1999 Spanish reform that allowed parents to reduce their working hours by up to a half while their youngest child was under age 6, along with job protection measures. Leveraging eligibility rules, we follow a regression kink design, comparing ineligible women to mothers who had varying lengths of eligibility, and tracking their subsequent work trajectories. Our findings show that longer eligibility led to a modest increase in maternal part-time work during her child's early years, with mothers working approximately one additional day part-time for each extra month of eligibility. This increase in part-time work substituted for days spent in unemployment rather than reducing full-time work, leading to a rise in earnings. In the long term, extended eligibility also led to improvements in both employment and earnings. Overall, we find that the policy had a positive impact on the labor supply and earnings of women with children, both in the short and long term.application/pdfeng© 2025 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).info:eu-repo/semantics/article2025-05-07http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2024.102672Worktime reductionMaternityChildcare policiesinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess