The growing labour force participation of women with small children in both the U.S. and Canada has led to calls for increased public financing for childcare. The optimality of public financing depends on a host of factors, such as the “crowd-out†of existing childcare arrangements, the impact on female labor supply, and the effects on child well-being. The introduction of universal, highlysubsidized childcare in Quebec in the late 1990s provides an opportunity to address these issues. This paper carefully analyzes the impacts of Quebec’s “$5 per day childcare†programme on childcare utilization,labor supply, and child (and parent) outcomes in two parent families. The authors find strong evidence of a shift into new childcare use, although approximately one third of the newly reported use appears to come from women who previously worked and had informal arrangements. The labour supply impact is highly significant, and the measured elasticity of 0.236 is slightly smaller than previous credible estimates. Finally, the authors uncover striking evidence that children are worse off in a variety of behavioral and health dimensions, ranging from aggression to motor-social skills to illness. This analysis also suggests that the new childcare programme led to more hostile, less consistent parenting, worse parental health, and lower-quality parental relationships.
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
David Blau, 2003.
"Child Care Subsidy Programs,"
NBER Chapters,
in: Means-Tested Transfer Programs in the United States, pages 443-516
National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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Other versions:
Killingsworth, Mark R. & Heckman, James J., 1987.
"Female labor supply: A survey,"
Handbook of Labor Economics,
in: O. Ashenfelter & R. Layard (ed.), Handbook of Labor Economics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 2, pages 103-204
Elsevier.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.