The impact of access to free childcare on women's labor market outcomes : evidence from a randomized trial in low-income neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro

Ricardo Paes de Barros · Pedro Olinto · Trine Lunde · Mirela Caralho

59 citations0/0 files stored

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics Work-Family Balance Challenges Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare

Abstract

The brief summarizes the impact of access to free childcare on women's labor market outcomes: evidence from a randomized trial in low-income neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro. The lottery for selection into ECD was carried out in 2007. The impact evaluation of Rio de Janeiro's public day-care program aims to answer the following three questions. First, how large is the increase in labor force participation of mothers due to the increased access to free child care? Second, what does the increase in labor force participation, if any, suggest about the net cost of the policy (subsidies offered minus new tax revenue collected)? Fourth, does public provision crowd out private provision? Finally, what effect does any change in child care (and associated increases in labor force participation) have on child and family outcomes? GAP funds contributed toward an additional job seeking skills training intervention implemented in half of the sample. The authors find that access to free publicly provided child care services led to a very large increase in the use of care, a considerable increase in mothers' employment (from 36 to 46 percent), and an almost doubling in the employment of mothers who were not working before the lottery took place. The authors find no statistically significant impact on hours worked for mothers who were employed, however. This rise in mothers' employment is associated with a modest increase in household incomes of 16 percent (from an average of R$569 to R$661 per month). Finally, the authors also find robust evidence that the public provision of free child care crowds out private provision, even in low income neighborhoods. Therefore, given that the estimated income impacts are smaller than the cost of public provision, direct transfers via vouchers for child care may be more cost effective than subsidized care via public provision.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 59 citations exist upstream.

References

2007The effect of a large expansion of pre-primary school facilities on preschool attendance and maternal employment 2004Medium- and long run effects of nutrition and child care: evaluation of a community nursery programme in rural Colombia

Cited by

2015The Early Years 2021Women’s reproductive health and economic activity: A narrative review 2019Social norms as a barrier to women’s employment in developing countries 2022Women, Business and the Law 2022Childcare and Mothers’ Labor Market Outcomes in Lower- and Middle-Income Countries 2019Cost-Effective Public Daycare in a Low-Income Economy Benefits Children and Mothers 2022Grandmothers and the gender gap in the Mexican labor market 2019Evidence-based gender equality policy and pay in Latin America and the Caribbean: progress and challenges

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.