IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/dicedp/398.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Discrimination on the child care market: A nationwide field experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Hermes, Henning
  • Lergetporer, Philipp
  • Mierisch, Fabian
  • Peter, Frauke

Abstract

We provide the first causal evidence of discrimination against migrants seeking child care. We send emails from fictitious parents to > 18, 000 early child care centers across Germany, asking if there is a slot available and how to apply. Randomly varying names to signal migration background, we find that migrants receive 4.4 percentage points fewer responses. Responses to migrants also contain substantially fewer slot offers, are shorter, and less encouraging. Exploring channels, discrimination against migrants does not differ by the perceived educational background of the email sender. However, it does differ by regional characteristics, being stronger in areas with lower shares of migrants in child care, higher right-wing vote shares, and lower financial resources. Discrimination on the child care market likely perpetuates existing inequalities of opportunities for disadvantaged children.

Suggested Citation

  • Hermes, Henning & Lergetporer, Philipp & Mierisch, Fabian & Peter, Frauke, 2023. "Discrimination on the child care market: A nationwide field experiment," DICE Discussion Papers 398, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE).
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:dicedp:398
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/270953/1/dice-dp398.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Joseph P. Romano & Michael Wolf, 2005. "Stepwise Multiple Testing as Formalized Data Snooping," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 73(4), pages 1237-1282, July.
    2. Jessen, Jonas & Schmitz, Sophia & Waights, Sevrin, 2020. "Understanding day care enrolment gaps," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 190(C).
    3. Simon Heß, 2017. "Randomization inference with Stata: A guide and software," Stata Journal, StataCorp LP, vol. 17(3), pages 630-651, September.
    4. Henning Hermes & Philipp Lergetporer & Fabian Mierisch & Guido Schwerdt & Simon Wiederhold, 2024. "Does Information about Inequality and Discrimination in Early Child Care Affect Policy Preferences?," CESifo Working Paper Series 10925, CESifo.
    5. Lewis Dijkstra & Hugo Poelman & Paolo Veneri, 2019. "The EU-OECD definition of a functional urban area," OECD Regional Development Working Papers 2019/11, OECD Publishing.
    6. Bertermann, Alexander & Kamhöfer, Daniel A. & Schildberg-Hörisch, Hannah, 2023. "More Education Does Make You Happier – Unless You Are Unemployed," IZA Discussion Papers 16454, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    7. Damian Clarke & Joseph P. Romano & Michael Wolf, 2020. "The Romano–Wolf multiple-hypothesis correction in Stata," Stata Journal, StataCorp LP, vol. 20(4), pages 812-843, December.
    8. John A. List & Azeem M. Shaikh & Yang Xu, 2019. "Multiple hypothesis testing in experimental economics," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 22(4), pages 773-793, December.
    9. Daniela Del Boca & Chiara Pronzato & Giuseppe Sorrenti, 2016. "When Rationing Plays a Role: Selection Criteria in the Italian Early Childcare System," CESifo Economic Studies, CESifo, vol. 62(4), pages 752-775.
    10. Kai Fischer & Simon Martin & Philipp Schmidt-Dengler, 2023. "The Heterogeneous Effects of Entry on Prices," CESifo Working Paper Series 10566, CESifo.
    11. Fischer, Kai & Martin, Simon & Schmidt-Dengler, Philipp, 2023. "The heterogeneous effects of entry on prices," DICE Discussion Papers 404, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE).
    12. Bertermann, Alexander & Kamhöfer, Daniel A. & Schildberg-Hörisch, Hannah, 2023. "More education does make you happier - unless you are unemployed," DICE Discussion Papers 406, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE).
    13. Felfe, Christina & Lalive, Rafael, 2018. "Does early child care affect children's development?," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 159(C), pages 33-53.
    14. Romano, Joseph P. & Wolf, Michael, 2016. "Efficient computation of adjusted p-values for resampling-based stepdown multiple testing," Statistics & Probability Letters, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 38-40.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Henning Hermes & Philipp Lergetporer & Fabian Mierisch & Guido Schwerdt & Simon Wiederhold, 2024. "Does Information about Inequality and Discrimination in Early Child Care Affect Policy Preferences?," CESifo Working Paper Series 10925, CESifo.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Hermes, Henning & Krauß, Marina & Lergetporer, Philipp & Peter, Frauke & Wiederhold, Simon, 2022. "Early Child Care and Labor Supply of Lower-SES Mothers: A Randomized Controlled Trial," IZA Discussion Papers 15814, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    2. Henning Hermes & Philipp Lergetporer & Fabian Mierisch & Frauke Peter & Simon Wiederhold, 2023. "Discrimination in Universal Social Programs? A Nationwide Field Experiment on Access to Child Care," CESifo Working Paper Series 10368, CESifo.
    3. Hermes, Henning & Lergetporer, Philipp & Peter, Frauke & Wiederhold, Simon, 2021. "Behavioral Barriers and the Socioeconomic Gap in Child Care Enrollment," IZA Discussion Papers 14698, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    4. Chowdhury, Shyamal & Hasan, Syed & Sharma, Uttam, 2024. "The Role of Trainee Selection in the Effectiveness of Vocational Training: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Nepal," IZA Discussion Papers 16705, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    5. Heath, Davidson & Ringgenberg, Matthew C. & Samadi, Mehrdad & Werner, Ingrid M., 2019. "Reusing Natural Experiments," Working Paper Series 2019-21, Ohio State University, Charles A. Dice Center for Research in Financial Economics.
    6. Thibaut Arpinon & Romain Espinosa, 2023. "A practical guide to Registered Reports for economists," Journal of the Economic Science Association, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 9(1), pages 90-122, June.
    7. Thibaut Arpinon & Romain Espinosa, 2023. "A Practical Guide to Registered Reports for Economists," Post-Print halshs-03897719, HAL.
    8. Hoffmann, Vivian & Rao, Vijayendra & Surendra, Vaishnavi & Datta, Upamanyu, 2021. "Relief from usury: Impact of a self-help group lending program in rural India," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 148(C).
    9. Berger, Eva M. & Fehr, Ernst & Hermes, Henning & Schunk, Daniel & Winkel, Kirsten, 2020. "The Impact of Working Memory Training on Children's Cognitive and Noncognitive Skills," IZA Discussion Papers 13338, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    10. Huebener, Mathias & Kuehnle, Daniel & Spiess, C. Katharina, 2019. "Parental leave policies and socio-economic gaps in child development: Evidence from a substantial benefit reform using administrative data," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(C).
    11. Philipp Jaschke & Sulin Sardoschau & Marco Tabellini, 2023. "Scared Straight? Threat and Assimilation of Refugees in Germany," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 384, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.
    12. Barschkett, Mara & Spieß, C. Katharina & Ziege, Elena, 2021. "Does Grandparenting Pay off for the Next Generations? Intergenerational Effects of Grandparental Care," IZA Discussion Papers 14795, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    13. Tyran, Jean-Robert & Mechtenberg, Lydia & Perino, Grischa & Treich, Nicolas & Wang, Stephanie, 2021. "Self-Signaling in Moral Voting," CEPR Discussion Papers 15645, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    14. Jaschke Philipp & Sulin Sardoschau & Marco Tabellini, 2021. "Scared Straight? Threat and Assimilation of Refugees in Germany," RF Berlin - CReAM Discussion Paper Series 2136, Rockwool Foundation Berlin (RF Berlin) - Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM).
    15. Jeffrey D. Michler & Anna Josephson, 2022. "Recent developments in inference: practicalities for applied economics," Chapters, in: A Modern Guide to Food Economics, chapter 11, pages 235-268, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    16. Libor Dušek & Nicolas Pardo & Christian Traxler, 2022. "Salience and Timely Compliance: Evidence from Speeding Tickets," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 41(2), pages 426-449, March.
    17. Jaschke, Philipp & Sardoschau, Sulin & Tabellini, Marco, 2021. "Scared Straight? Threat and Assimilation of Refugees in Germany," IZA Discussion Papers 14962, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    18. Climent Quintana-Domeque & Jingya Zeng & Xiaohui Zhang, 2022. "Internet and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from the UK," Discussion Papers 2202, University of Exeter, Department of Economics.
    19. Azevedo E Castro De Cardim,Joana & Amaro Da Costa Luz Carneiro,Pedro Manuel & Carvalho,Leandro S. & De Walque,Damien B. C. M., 2022. "Early Education, Preferences, and Decision-Making Abilities," Policy Research Working Paper Series 10187, The World Bank.
    20. Mira Bierbaum & Eleonora E M Nillesen, 2021. "Sustaining the integrity of the threatened self: A cluster-randomised trial among social assistance applicants in the Netherlands," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 16(6), pages 1-21, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    child care; discrimination; information provision; inequality; field experiment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J13 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Fertility; Family Planning; Child Care; Children; Youth
    • J18 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Public Policy
    • J22 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Time Allocation and Labor Supply
    • C93 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Field Experiments

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:dicedp:398. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/diduede.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.