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...ies in our sample, Germany, Portugal, Ireland, and the US use a system of joint taxation of married couples, and France uses a system of family splitting.2 All the other countries have systems based on individual taxation of couples, which nevertheless often feature some elements of joint taxation through specific exemptions or alike. There exist other factors than taxation and gender wage gaps that are likely relevant in explaining international differences in the labor supply of married women. One obvious candidate is the supply and the price of child care (see e.g. Attanasio et al. (2008), Bick (2011)). Data on child care availability and costs are unfortunately scarce. In Section 6, we analyze hours worked of women 1Prescott (2004) calibrates his model to the average hours worked across seven countries and two time periods and can thus speak about cross-sectional results in addition to time-series results. 2The exact form of joint taxation differs from country to country. 2 with and without preschool children separately, and use the available data on child care in order to parameterize the cost of children. The most closely related paper to ours is Chakraborty et al. (2012). They build a ...