Matias Berthelon, Diana Kruger, Catalina Lauer, Luca Tiberti, Carlos Zamora
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Better employment quality can improve personal well-being, social cohesion, and inclusive growth and development. Yet good quality jobs—associated with greater well-being—are less accessible to women than men. While it is understood that policies balancing family and work lead to greater female labor participation, this paper investigates whether one such policy—increased childcare—improves the quality of jobs where mothers are employed. The context we analyze is a nationwide school reform in Chile that extended school schedules for primary school-aged children, providing childcare services. We combine administrative data of the phase-in of the policy with panel data of individual mothers’ employment outcomes and socio-economic characteristics. We estimate a fixed-effects model that controls for mothers’ unobserved heterogeneity and identifies the effect of the policy from plausibly exogenous temporal and spatial variations in access to schools with long schedules and exogenous exposure to the policy. We find a positive effect of childcare on several measures of employment quality and gender gaps within the couple. Our evidence suggests that the mechanism driving the impact is the implicit subsidy to the cost of childcare, affecting the opportunity cost of mothers’ time. In addition, we find heterogeneous results by mothers’ education level. Access to childcare through longer primary school schedules can increase household welfare and can play a role in reducing income and gender inequalities.
期刊介绍:
Economic Policy provides timely and authoritative analyses of the choices confronting policymakers. The subject matter ranges from the study of how individual markets can and should work to the broadest interactions in the world economy. Economic Policy features: Analysis of key issues as they emerge Views of top international economists Frontier thinking without technical jargon Wide-reaching coverage of worldwide policy debate