This thesis contains three independent chapters that investigate work decisions and labour market outcomes of mothers and their potential dynamic consequences. Furthermore, it focuses on intended and unintended effects of family policies. The first chapter, joint work with Dominik Sachs, Fabian Stürmer-Heiber, and Hélène Turon, studies the long-term fiscal implications of childcare subsidies through their impact on maternal labour supply. We explicitly capture life-cycle career aspects in a dynamic structural household model of female labour supply and childcare decisions: higher labour supply of mothers today results in higher expected future earnings. Using German survey data, we provide a structural estimate of the degree to which childcare subsidies are dynamically self-financing through higher labour income tax revenue. Our estimates show that targeting childcare subsidies is a useful tool to increase the ability of these policies to be self-financing. The second chapter, joint work with Gabriela Galassi and Lukas Mayr, documents a substantial positive correlation of employment status between mothers and their children in the United States. Controlling for ability, education, fertility, and wealth, a one-year increase in maternal employment is associated with six weeks more employment of her child. The intergenerational transmission is stronger to daughters and more pronounced for low-educated and low-income mothers. Investigating potential mechanisms, we provide evidence for a role-model channel, through which labour force participation is transmitted. The third chapter studies the effect of a divorce law reform on the probability to pay alimony as a divorced father using German administrative data. We show with a difference-in-differences setup that the reform decreased the probability to pay alimony if the youngest common child was aged four to eight compared to sixteen to seventeen. Furthermore, the treatment intensity varies with the age of the youngest child with the largest impact between four and five, thereby decreasing the disposable income of divorced mothers with younger children to a greater extent.