Juuso Mäkinen

Work in progress

Family taxation and labor supply
Working paper: Helsinki GSE (5/2026)

I study a tax policy in Finland in 1976 that changed the basis for income taxation from couple's joint income to individual income. With this shift from family to individual taxation, secondary earners within households experienced large drops in their participation tax rates and marginal tax rates. Because most of these secondary earners were women, the reform leveled gender differences in labor market opportunities. I find that the reform-induced changes in participation tax rates contributed to the rise in women's employment over the 1970s: The policy encouraged around 7,800 women to participate in the labor market, increasing married women's employment rate by 1.7 percentage points. The effects correspond to an average participation elasticity of 0.17. The increases in employment were driven by women with compulsory education and mothers with school-age children. For mothers, the participation elasticities range from zero to 0.3 depending on the age of the youngest child. Finally, I show that the shift from family to individual income taxation influenced within-household income shares among self-employed couples, generating bunching at 0.5 in the share distribution.

Life-cycle effects of public childcare: Evidence on children and their parents, with Mikko Silliman
Working paper: Helsinki GSE (12/2025); RFBerlin (1/2026)

This paper provides large-scale evidence linking the economic effects of childcare programs to social skills measured in adulthood. We examine Finland's first national public childcare program, and document that it increased parental labor supply - through retirement - while reducing the intergenerational persistence of income. Critically, we leverage Finnish Defence Forces data on the near population of males to show that effects on children's adult income are underlied by lasting effects on social skills. Further, we show that life-cycle cost-effectiveness estimates based on the assumption of constant effects after typical observation windows can considerably overestimate the net costs of public childcare.