Participation in non‐parental child care arrangements is now the norm for preschool‐age children in the U.S. However, child care services are becoming increasingly expensive for many families, and ...quality is highly uneven across providers and sectors, raising questions about the impact of child care costs and quality on parental employment and child development. The U.S. policy landscape is dominated by three policies that subsidize costs for low‐income families or attempt to improve the safety and quality of providers: the Child Care and Development Fund, regulations, and quality rating and improvement systems. In this paper, I provide a thorough review of the evidence on each policy, focusing on how they influence a wide range of family and provider outcomes. The paper begins with a detailed description of the structure and functioning of the child care market, using the most up‐to‐date data on families’ utilization of care services and provider characteristics. I then draw on a diverse set of studies across multiple fields to summarize the evidence on the impact of child care policy. In the final section of the paper, I offer recommendations for future research in each policy area.
•OBRA90 EITC expansion→mental-health and subjective well-being (SWB) improvements.•Experiential, evaluative and eudemonic SWB ↑ more for married mothers MM than unmarried.•MM depression (exp) ↓ ...15.7%, happiness (eval) ↑ 4.4% and self-esteem (eud) ↑ 10.1%.•Specification checks ↑ confidence that effects are explained by EITC expansion.•Explore mechanisms that may explain differential impact of EITC by marital status.
We study the impact of the earned income tax credit (EITC) on various measures of subjective well-being (SWB) using the National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) to estimate intent-to-treat effects of the EITC expansion embedded in the 1990 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. We use a difference-in-differences framework that compares the pre-and post-expansion SWB-changes of women likely eligible for the EITC (low-skilled mothers of working age) to the SWB-changes of a comparison group that is likely ineligible (low-skilled, childless women of working age). Our results suggest that the EITC expansion generated sizeable SWB-improvements in the three major categories of SWB identified in the literature. The NSFH is one of few datasets containing all three major categories of SWB. Subgroup analyses by marital status suggest that improvements accrued more to married than unmarried mothers. Relative to their childless counterparts, married mothers experienced a 15.7% decrease in depression symptomatology (experiential SWB), a 4.4% increase in happiness (evaluative SWB), and a 10.1% increase in self-esteem (eudemonic SWB). We also present specification checks that increase confidence that the observed SWB-effects are explained by the OBRA90 EITC expansion. Lastly, we explore mechanisms that may explain the differential impact of the EITC expansion by marital status.
Although a large literature examines the effect of non-parental child care on preschool-aged children's cognitive development, few studies deal convincingly with the potential endogeneity of child ...care choices. Using a panel of infants and toddlers from the Birth cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-B), this paper attempts to provide causal estimates by leveraging heretofore unrecognized seasonal variation in child care participation. Child assessments in the ECLS-B were conducted on a rolling basis throughout the year, and I use the participation “dip” among those assessed during the summer as the basis for an instrumental variable. The summer participation dip is likely to be exogenous because ECLS-B administrators strictly controlled the mechanism by which children were assigned to assessment dates. The OLS results show that children utilizing non-parental arrangements score higher on tests of cognitive ability, a finding that holds after accounting for individual fixed effects. However, the instrumental variables estimates point to sizeable negative effects of non-parental care. The adverse effects are driven by participation in formal settings, and, contrary to previous research, I find that disadvantaged children do not benefit from exposure to non-parental care.
•This paper studies the effect of child care on preschoolers' mental development.•Identifying variation is provided by seasonal variation in child care participation.•OLS results show that children in child care score higher on mental ability tests.•However, the IV estimates point to sizeable negative effects of non-parental care.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the cost of child care in the U.S. has increased substantially over the past few decades. This paper marshals data from a variety of sources to rigorously assess the ...issue. It begins by using a large survey dataset to trace the evolution in families’ child care expenditures. I find that the typical family currently spends 14 percent more on child care than it did in 1990. This is less than half the increase documented in previous work. In addition, most families allocate approximately the same share of income to child care as they did several decades ago. The next section of the paper examines the trend in the market price of child care. The evidence suggests that after persistent, albeit modest, growth throughout the 1990s, market prices have been essentially flat for at least a decade. In the paper's final section, I analyze several features of the child care market that may have implications for prices, including the demand for child care, the skill-level of the child care workforce, and state regulations. A few findings are noteworthy. First, I show that child care demand stagnated around the same time that market prices leveled-off. Second, although the skill-level of the child care workforce increased in absolute terms, highly-educated women increasingly find child care employment less attractive than other occupations. Finally, child care regulations have not systematically increased in stringency, and they appear to have small and inconsistent effects on market prices. Together, these results indicate that the production of child care has not become more costly, which may explain the recent stagnation in market prices.
This article examines racial and ethnic discrimination in the child care teacher hiring process. We construct a unique data set that combines a résumé audit study of center-based providers with a ...follow-up survey of those in the original audit sample. Fictitious résumés were randomly assigned White-, Black-, and Hispanic-sounding names and submitted in response to real teacher job advertisements. The survey was then administered to capture the characteristics of children, teachers, and administrators within the center. These data reveal three key results. First, we find robust evidence of discrimination: Black and Hispanic applicants receive significantly fewer interview requests than observationally equivalent Whites. Second, our results are consistent with a model of customer discrimination: The racial and ethnic composition of the center’s customer base is correlated with the characteristics of job seekers receiving an interview. Finally, we show that states’ child care regulations mitigate the racial and ethnic gap in interview requests.
Stay-at-home orders (SAHOs) were implemented in most U.S. states to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. This paper quantifies the impact of these containment policies on a measure of the supply of child ...care. The supply of such services may be particularly vulnerable to a SAHO-type policy shock, given that many providers are liquidity-constrained. Using plausibly exogenous variation from the staggered adoption of SAHOs across states, we find that online job postings for early care and education teachers declined by 16% after enactment. This effect is driven exclusively by private-sector services. Indeed, hiring by public programs like Head Start and pre-kindergarten has not been influenced by SAHOs. We also find that ECE job postings increased dramatically after SAHOs were lifted, although the number of such postings remains 4% lower than that during the pre-pandemic period. There is little evidence that child care search behavior among households was altered by SAHOs. Because forced supply-side changes appear to be at play, our results suggest that households may not be well-equipped to insure against the rapid transition to the production of child care. We discuss the implications of these results for child development and parental employment decisions.
•Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) are increasingly deployed by U.S. states to monitor and improve the quality of non-parental child care settings.•This paper draws on a variety of ...datasets to empirically characterize the way in which families and providers respond to the enactment of QRIS.•Estimates from difference-in-differences models reveal that although QRIS induces families to shift from parental to non-parental care, economically disadvantaged families are more likely to use informal care, while their advantaged counterparts are more likely to use formal care.•QRIS increases the supply of high-skilled labor, particularly within the center-based sector.•States that administer a wage compensation program alongside their QRIS experience larger increases in child care supply and compensation as well as lower turnover rates than states operating a QRIS in isolation.
Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) are increasingly deployed by U.S. states to monitor and improve the quality of non-parental child care settings. By making information on program quality accessible to the public, QRIS attempts to alter parental preferences for quality-related attributes and encourage competition between providers. This paper draws on a variety of datasets to empirically characterize the way in which families and providers respond to the enactment of QRIS. Specifically, it exploits the differential timing in states’ QRIS roll-out to examine two sets of outcomes: (i) families’ child care choices and maternal employment and (ii) the supply and compensation of child care labor. Estimates from difference-in-differences models reveal several noteworthy findings. First, although QRIS induces families to shift from parental to non-parental care, economically disadvantaged families are more likely to use informal care, while their advantaged counterparts are more likely to use formal care. Second, QRIS increases the supply of high-skilled labor, particularly within the center-based sector. Third, all but the most highly-skilled child care workers experience rising compensation levels but also greater turnover. Finally, states that administer a wage compensation program alongside their QRIS experience larger increases in child care supply and compensation as well as lower turnover rates than states operating a QRIS in isolation.
This paper assesses the impact of welfare reform's parental work requirements on low-income children's cognitive and social-emotional development. The identification strategy exploits an important ...feature of the work requirement rules—namely, age-of-youngest-child exemptions—as a source of quasi-experimental variation in first-year maternal employment. The 1996 welfare reform law empowered states to exempt adult recipients from the work requirements until the youngest child reaches a certain age. This led to substantial variation in the amount of time that mothers can remain home with a newborn child. I use this variation to estimate the impact of work-requirement-induced increases in maternal employment. Using a sample of infants from the Birth cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, the reduced form and instrumental variables estimates reveal sizable negative effects of maternal employment. An auxiliary analysis of mechanisms finds that working mothers experience an increase in depressive symptoms, and are less likely to breastfeed and read to their children. In addition, such children are exposed to nonparental child care arrangements at a younger age, and they spend more time in these settings throughout the first year of life.
Offline effects of online connecting Guldi, Melanie; Herbst, Chris M.
Journal of population economics,
01/2017, Letnik:
30, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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Broadband (high-speed) internet access expanded rapidly from 1999 to 2007 and is associated with higher economic growth and labor market activity. In this paper, we examine whether the rollout also ...affected the social connections that teens make. Specifically, we look at the relationship between increased broadband access and teen fertility. We hypothesize that increasing access to high-speed internet can influence fertility decisions by changing the size of the market as well as increasing the information available to participants in the market. We seek to understand both the overall effect of broadband internet on teen fertility and the mechanisms underlying this effect. Our results suggest that increased broadband access explains at least 7 % of the decline in the teen birth rate between 1999 and 2007. Although we focus on social markets, this work contributes more broadly to an understanding of how new technology interacts with existing markets.
This paper provides some of the first evidence on the relationship between Head Start funding expansions and program inputs. We take advantage of the county–year variation in funding increases that ...were implemented due to a number of legislated policy changes in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. By focusing on the period between 1988 and 2007, we show that the funding increases were directed at increasing total and full-time enrollment. We also show that the funding expansions were used to make several quality-related investments, including increasing the number of teachers and staff and upgrading the skill level of teachers.
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