Does child care availability play a role in maternal employment and children’s development? Evidence from Italy

Ylenia Brilli, Daniela Del Boca and Chiara Pronzato

Review of Economics of the Household, 2016, vol. 14, issue 1, 27-51

Abstract: This paper investigates the effects of public child care availability in Italy in mothers’ working status and children’s scholastic achievements. We use a newly available dataset containing individual standardized test scores of pupils attending the second grade of primary school in 2009–2010 in conjunction with data on public child care availability. Our estimates indicate a positive and significant effects of child care availability on both mothers’ working status and children’s Language test scores. We find that a percentage change in public child care coverage increases mothers’ probability to work by 1.3 percentage points and children’s Language test scores by 0.85 percent of one standard deviation; we do not find any effect on Math test scores. Moreover, the impact of a percentage change in public child care on mothers’ employment and children’s Language test scores is greater in provinces where child care availability is more limited. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016

Keywords: Child care; Female employment; Child cognitive outcomes; Test scores; J13; I2; H75 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (74)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11150-013-9227-4 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Does child care availability play a role in maternal employment and children's development? Evidence from Italy (2013)
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:kap:reveho:v:14:y:2016:i:1:p:27-51

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/11150/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11150-013-9227-4

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Economics of the Household is currently edited by Shoshana Grossbard

More articles in Review of Economics of the Household from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().