Child Care Subsidies and Childhood Obesity

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. Child care subsidies play a critical role in facilitating the transition of disadvantaged mothers from welfare to work. However, little is known about the influence of these policies on children's health and well-being. In this paper, we study the impact of subsidy receipt on lowincome children's weight outcomes in the fall and spring of kindergarten. The goals of our empirical analysis are twofold. We first utilize standard OLS and fixed effects methods to explore body mass index as well as measures of overweight and obesity. We then turn to quantile regression to address the possibility that subsidy receipt has heterogeneous effects on children's weight at different points in the BMI distribution. Results suggest that subsidy receipt is associated with increases in BMI and a greater likelihood of being overweight and obese. We also find substantial variation in subsidy effects across the BMI distribution. In particular, child care subsidies have no effect on BMI at the lower end of the distribution, inconsistent effects in the middle of the distribution, and large effects at the top of the distribution. Our results point to the use of non-parental child care, particularly center-based services, as the key mechanism through which subsidies influence children's weight outcomes.JEL Classification: I12, I18, J13

One-child policy and childhood obesity

“…For both BMI and weight-for-age z-scores, we observe significant positive coefficients for being raised in a one-child family at the upper end of the distribution (greater than 75%), which are larger in magnitude than those at the lower end. These results are similar to those of previous studies (Herbst & Tekin, 2010), suggesting that children at the upper end of the distribution have larger gains from being the only children in BMI and weight than do those at the lower end.…”

Public Policies, Women's Employment after Childbearing, and Child Well-Being

“…Finally, more generous child care subsidies do not have meaningful effects on either cognitive scores or behavior problems (we can rule out an increase of more than .06 standard deviations in behavior problems, and a decrease of more than .075 in cognitive scores). This result is reassuring given prior findings in the U.S. (Herbst and Tekin, 2010, in press) and Canada (Baker, Gruber, and Milligan, 2008) linking child care subsidies with poorer outcomes for children.…”

“… 3 This finding is echoed in recent work on the U.S. child care subsidy program (Herbst and Tekin, 2010; in press). …”

Early maternal employment and childhood obesity among economically disadvantaged families in the USA

“…Finally, our findings also indicated that home-based, more informal childcare settings, as opposed to formal centre care or mother care, appeared to offer children some protection from the negative obesity outcomes related to maternal employment in the second year of the child's life. Prior research has documented that formal child care settings often do not meet dietary intake or physical activity recommendations for young children (Bollella et al, 1999;Gubbels et al, 2009;Story et al, 2010) and may be linked with higher childhood obesity (Herbst & Tekin, 2009). For mothers combining employment with full-time mother care, most were in more informal jobs such as child care, hairdresser, food preparer, or medical attendant.…”