The Impact of Childcare Costs on Mothers’ Labor Force Participation

Valeska Araujo, Linden McBride and Danielle Sandler

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: The rising costs of childcare pose challenges for families, leading to difficult choices including those impacting mothers’ labor force participation. This paper investigates the relationship between childcare costs and maternal employment. Using data from the National Database of Childcare Prices, the American Community Survey, and the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics, we estimate the impact of childcare costs on mothers’ labor force participation through two empirical strategies. A fixed-effects approach controls for geographic and temporal heterogeneity in costs as well as mothers’ idiosyncratic preferences for work and childcare, while an instrumental variables approach addresses the endogeneity of mothers’ preferences for work and childcare by leveraging exogenous geographic and temporal variation in childcare licensing requirements. Our findings across both research designs indicate that higher childcare costs reduce labor force participation among mothers, with lower-income mothers exhibiting greater responsiveness to changes in childcare costs.

Keywords: childcare; female labor force participation; child penalty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 M50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/library/working-papers/2025/adrm/ces/CES-WP-25-25.pdf First version, 2025 (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:cen:wpaper:25-25

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dawn Anderson ().