Where There’s Smoke: Stochastic Caregiving Shocks and Mothers’ Labor Market Outcomes

Formal childcare and public schooling are widely understood to be central to mothers’ labor market attachment. Yet, a large literature finds that even substantial expansions of formal childcare produce modest or null effects on maternal employment. We study the role of stochastic caregiving demand shocks that cause childcare constraints to bind intermittently even when formal care is available. Using plausibly exogenous variation in wildfire smoke exposure, we show that smoke increases school closures and student absenteeism, generating caregiving demand. Further, by comparing mothers whose youngest child varies in reliance on school-based childcare, we find that these shocks impose substantial contemporaneous costs and, when accumulated, reduce employment. Employment losses are fully offset among mothers working outside male-dominated industries, consistent with workplace tolerance moderating the consequences of intermittent caregiving demands.