Information and Women's Intentions: Experimental Evidence about Child Care

Vincenzo Galasso, Paola Profeta, Chiara Pronzato and Francesco Billari

No 75, Working Papers from "Carlo F. Dondena" Centre for Research on Social Dynamics (DONDENA), Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi

Abstract: We investigate the effect of providing information about the benefits to children of attending formal child care when women intend to use formal child care so they can work. We postulate that the reaction to the information differs across women according to their characteristics, specifically their level of education. We present a randomized experiment in which 700 Italian women of reproductive age with no children are exposed to positive information about formal child care through a text message or a video, while others are not. We find a positive effect on the intention to use formal child care, and a negative effect on the intention to work. This average result hides important heterogeneities: the positive effect on formal child care use is driven by better-educated women, while the negative effect on work intention is found only among less-educated women. These findings may be explained by women’s education reflecting their work-family orientation, and their ability to afford formal child care.

Keywords: Female labour supply; education; gender roles. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2015-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-exp
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://ftp.dondena.unibocconi.it/WorkingPapers/Dondena_WP075.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Failed to connect to FTP server ftp.dondena.unibocconi.it: No such host is known.

Related works:
Journal Article: Information and Women’s Intentions: Experimental Evidence About Child Care (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:don:donwpa:075

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.dondena.unibocconi.it/wp/

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from "Carlo F. Dondena" Centre for Research on Social Dynamics (DONDENA), Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi via Rontgen, 1 - 20136 Milano.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Amy Johnson ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).