The Geographic Accessibility of Child Care Subsidies and Evidence on the Impact of Subsidy Receipt on Childhood Obesity

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of the spatial accessibility of public human services agencies on the likelihood of receiving a child care subsidy among disadvantaged mothers with young children. In particular, we collect data on the location of virtually every human services agency in the U.S. and use this information to calculate the approximate distance that families must travel from home in order to reach the nearest office that administers the subsidy application process. Using data from the Kindergarten cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K), our results indicate that an increase in the distance to a public human services agency reduces the likelihood that a family receives a child care subsidy. Specifically, we estimate an elasticity of subsidy receipt with respect to distance of -0.13. The final section of the paper provides an empirical application in which we use variation in families' travel distance to identify the causal effect of child care subsidies on children's weight outcomes. Our instrumental variables estimates suggest that subsidized child care leads to sizeable increases in the prevalence of overweight and obesity among low-income children.

The Impact of Non-Parental Child Care on Child Development: Evidence from the Summer Participation 'Dip'

“…Herbst and Tekin (2010a;2010b;2012) find that CCDF child care subsidies have negative effects on preschool-aged children, lowering cognitive ability test scores and increasing a variety of behavior problems. On the other hand, studies of Head Start (e.g., Deming, 2009;Ludwig & Miller, 2007; U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2005; and pre-kindergarten (e.g., Gormley & Gayer, 2005;Hustedt et al, 2007;Wong et al, 2008) produce more favorable cognitive and social-emotional outcomes.…”

“…Such analyses are potentially important, given that previous maternal employment and child care studies find significant variation across these subgroups. For example, it appears that economically advantaged children tend to be more adversely affected by early maternal work (Anderson et al, 2003) and child care policy reforms (Herbst & Tekin, 2010a;2012). A related stream of research finds that economically disadvantaged children benefit substantially more from early exposure to non-parental care (Loeb et al, 2004).…”

“…Although the policy instruments are reasonably powerful in the first-stage equation (F=14.7), it is possible that many of them are related to child development beyond their correlation with child care time, thus potentially invalidating them as instruments. 7 Another concern is that the measure of child care time is derived from mothers' employment history, making it difficult to 5 The claim that only one other child care paper utilizes an IV strategy should not be confused with the work of Gelbach (2002) and Herbst and Tekin (2010a;2012). Gelbach instruments for kindergarten attendance, not child care arrangements per se, and explores maternal employment as the outcome.…”

Childcare subsidy policy: What it can and cannot accomplish

“…In related work, the same authors document that subsidies served under the CCDF lead to an increased prevalence of excess body weight and obesity among children [10]. They also examine whether childcare subsidies influence other dimensions of family well-being, specifically the physical and mental health of mothers and the quality of child-parent interactions [11].…”

“…Evidence-based policy making are growing concerns that the twin goals of the CCDF-to encourage employment and to advance the quality of childcare-are in conflict with each other [7], [8], [9], [10], [11]. It is argued that the tension between the two goals is exacerbated by the current structure of the CCDF, which places too much emphasis on the goal of increasing parental employment and too little on enhancing the quality of childcare.…”