Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides the most important differences between Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom regarding policies that affect women’s combination of work and children. It presents the research on the effect of children on women’s career and earnings and analyses earnings of women as the share in total earned household income before and after the birth of children. The book discusses the determinants of share of earnings of the wife decomposed into predicted wage, probability of labour force participation and predicted hours of work, simplifying the analysis by assuming husband’s income to be exogenous. It deals with the relation between accumulated human capital and the timing of births in a woman’s life, and explains women’s age at maternity and the age at having a subsequent child.