To Grandmother’s House We Go: Childcare Time Transfers and Female Labor Mobility

Garrett Anstreicher and Joanna Venator

No 1051, Boston College Working Papers in Economics from Boston College Department of Economics

Abstract: Women in the United States frequently rely on childcare from extended family but can only do so if they live in the same location as them. This paper studies how child care costs, the location of extended family, and fertility events influence both the labor force attachment and labor mobility of women in the United States. We begin by empirically documenting strong patterns of women returning to their home locations in anticipation of fertility events, indicating that the desire for intergenerational time transfers is an important motivator of home migration. Moreover, women who reside in their parent’s location experience a substantial long-run reduction in their child earnings penalty. Next, we build a dynamic model of labor force participation and migration to assess the incidence of counterfactual scenarios and childcare policies. We find that childcare subsidies increase lifetime earnings and labor mobility for women, with particularly strong effects for women who are ever single mothers and Blacks. Ignoring migration can understate the welfare benefits of these policies by a meaningful extent.

Keywords: Migration; childcare; female labor supply; human capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J22 J61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-09-16
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-dge, nep-lab, nep-mig and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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