Promoting integration of immigrants. Effects of free child care on child enrollment and parental employment
Nina Drange () and
Kjetil Telle
Discussion Papers from Statistics Norway, Research Department
Abstract:
Proficiency in the language spoken by the majority population may be crucial for the cognitive development of children from immigrant families. High-quality child care is believed to promote such language skills, and it is thus of concern that children from immigrant families are underrepresented in formal child care across OECD countries. How can we increase their participation, and can such participation improve family integration? We study an intervention in some districts of Oslo where children aged four and five were eligible for twenty hours of free childcare weekly. Taking advantage of the intervention being available in some city districts and not in others, we estimate the effect of the intervention on the enrollment of children and on their parents' employment and education, using outcomes measured for the same family before and after the child's age of eligibility. We find that the intervention increased the participation for children from immigrant families by 15 percent. However, we do not find support for effects on parental employment or education. The performance in tests at school entry (age six) for children from immigrant families in city districts with free child care is better than that of similar children in comparison districts. Overall, our results suggest that subsidizing center based child care can improve the cognitive development of children from immigrant families.
Keywords: child care; education; immigrant children; integration; assimilation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H52 I28 J13 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-eur, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ssb.no/en/forskning/discussion-papers/_attachment/218322 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found
Related works:
Journal Article: Promoting integration of immigrants: Effects of free child care on child enrollment and parental employment (2015) 
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:ssb:dispap:799
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://www.ssb.no/e ... ration-of-immigrants
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Discussion Papers from Statistics Norway, Research Department P.O.Box 8131 Dep, N-0033 Oslo, Norway. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by L Maasø ().