Family proximity, childcare, and women’s labor force attachment

Abstract

a b s t r a c tWe show that close geographical proximity to mothers or mothers-in-law has a substantial positive effect on the labor supply of married women with young children. We argue that the mechanism through which proximity increases labor supply is the availability of childcare. We interpret availability broadly enough to include not only regular scheduled childcare during work hours but also an insurance aspect of proximity (e.g., a mother or mother-in-law who can to provide irregular or unanticipated childcare). Using two large datasets, the National Survey of Families and Households and the public use files of the U.S. Census, we find that the predicted probability of employment and labor force participation is 4-10 percentage points higher for married women with young children living in close proximity to their mothers or their mothers-in-law compared with those living further away.

Coresidence with elderly parents and female labor supply in China

“…Nagase (1997) also finds that the presence of a grandmother in the household significantly increases the probability of employment for Japanese married women, while the presence of a grandfather does not seem to help. Negligible to substantial positive impacts of coresidence or nearby residence with grandparents on female employment are documented in a few studies in developed countries (Compton and Pollak 2014;Garcia-Moran and Kuehn 2012;Kolodinsky and Shirey 2000). A related branch of study examines the importance of time transfers from grandparents.…”

“…Previous studies propose that a major reason why residential proximity to parents increases female labor supply is substantive parental assistance in housekeeping and childcare (Compton and Pollak 2014;Oishi and Oshio 2006;Sasaki 2002), while rigorous analyses are limited. In our sample, 70% of women who are not working cite the most important reason as 'taking care of housework,' which indicates that domestic burdens are a major obstacle to female employment.…”

“…By contrast, the share of independent-living elders rose sharply from 26.7% to 41.7% over the same period (Hu and Peng 2014). 6 Given the frequent time and monetary transfers in multi-generational households, researchers have increasingly paid attention to the impact of coresidence with elderly parents on female labor supply in Japan (Ogawa and Ermisch 1996;Sasaki 2002), South Korea (Chun, Kim, and Lee 2009), the United States (Kolodinsky and Shirey 2000;Compton and Pollak 2014) and Europe (Pagani and Marenzi 2008). The few articles touching upon the subject in China have revealed that grandparents in multi-generational households undertake a tremendous amount of grandchild care, which significantly reduces a mother's involvement in childcare (Chen, Liu, and Mair 2011;Chen, Short, and Entwisle 2000).…”

Grandparental availability for child care and maternal labor force participation: pension reform evidence from Italy

“…4 Neither of these studies, however, takes into account that surviving grandparents may greatly differ in the amount of time they can devote to childcare, an aspect acknowledged in two recent papers that exploit differences in grandparental labor market participation generated by changes in retirement eligibility rules. In the first, Aparicio-Fenoll and Vidal-Fernandez (2015;hereafter, AFVF) use age-based pension eligibility as an identification source in three waves 2 Other studies proxy grandparental availability for childcare by exploiting variations in their geographic proximity based on the assumption that the closer the grandparents live to their children or children-in-law, the more available they are for childcare (e.g., Compton and Pollak 2014). However, residential choices of both the women and their grandparents may be endogenous.…”

“…The same criticism applies to studies that examine the effect on women's labor market outcomes of grandparents residing with the family (Leibowitz et al 1992;Ogawa and Ermisch 1996;Abendroth et al 2012) without addressing this arrangement's potential endogeneity. Compton and Pollak (2014) address this endogeneity issue by using a sample of military wives whose husbands' locations are determined by the military. They offer some evidence that military wives residing in their birth state are more likely to be in the labor force.…”