Juuso Mäkinen

Work in progress

Family taxation and labor supply

I study a tax policy in Finland in 1976 that changed the basis for income taxation from couple's joint earnings to individual earnings. Following the shift from family taxation to individual taxation, secondary earners within households experienced large drops in their participation and marginal tax rates. Because secondary earners were predominantly women, the reform levelled the differences in labor market opportunities between men and women. I find that the reform-induced changes in participation tax rates contributed to the rise in female employment over the 1970s - I estimate that 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 compulsory educated women and mothers with school-age children. For mothers, the participation elasticities range from 0 to 0.3 depending on the age of the youngest child.

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.