Grandparents and women's participation in the labor market

The conciliation of work and family life is a challenge to most women. In some countries, although not in southern Europe, women make significant use of part-time schedules as a way of balancing work and family life. Informal care, typically care by grandparents, is an alternative. It is cheap, trustworthy, and possibly compatible with non-standard labor schedules. In this paper we investigate how childcare by grandparents affects the probability of working of mothers in southern European countries. We empirically evaluate the verification and the significance of such an effect, accounting for a potentially endogenous grandparent-caring status