The Impact of Child‐Care Subsidies on Child Development: Evidence from Geographic Variation in the Distance to Social Service Agencies

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the impact of U.S. child-care subsidies on the cognitive and behavioral development of children in low-income female-headed families. We identify the effect of subsidy receipt by exploiting geographic variation in the distance that families must travel from home to reach the nearest social service agency that administers the subsidy application process. Using data from the Kindergarten cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, our instrumental variables estimates suggest that children receiving subsidized child care in the year before kindergarten score lower on tests of cognitive ability and reveal more behavior problems throughout kindergarten. An auxiliary analysis of longer-run outcomes shows that these negative effects largely disappear by the time children finish first grade. C 2015 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

Universal Child Care and Long-Term Effects on Child Well-Being: Evidence from Canada

“…However, the vast majority of studies dealing with this issue relate to such infections. Ball et al (2000) 28 They are also consistent with Herbst and Tekin (2016), in the United States. These authors nd that children receiving childcare subsidies have lower cognitive ability scores and more behavioral problems early on but these eects largely vanish by grade 3 when children are about 8 years old.…”

¿Contribuyen los subsidios estatales al desarrollo cognitivo temprano? La Asignación Universal por Hijo en el contexto argentino

“…La ausencia de efectos en algunas pruebas podría deberse a que hay otras variables que se encuentran en juego, como ya se dijo, además de las medidas y evaluadas. Por un lado, esto se condice con investigaciones previas en donde no se encontraron efectos antes de los tres años de vida (Ayoub et al, 2009;Herbst & Tekin, 2016;Roggman et al, 2009).…”

Who's minding the kids? Experimental evidence on the demand for child care quality

“…This market failure is likely to perpetuate itself because, when parents fail to recognize high-quality care and cannot make well-informed decisions, the demand for high-quality care would be lower-resulting in lower prices-than would be the case if parents were perfectly informed. Lower prices would in turn drive out higher-quality providers from the market thereby causing market-wide quality to fall further(Blau, 2001;Vandell & Wolfe, 2000;Herbst & Tekin, 2016;. These quality problems are reflected in part by stagnant wages, low skills, and high rates of turnover among workers(Bassok et al, 2013; Boyd-Swan & Herbst, 2018;.4 In fact, parents usually report high levels of satisfaction with their child care arrangement.…”