The Impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. Child Care Market: Evidence from Stay-At-Home Orders

Umair Ali (), Chris M. Herbst () and Christos Makridis
Additional contact information
Chris M. Herbst: Arizona State University

No 13261, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Stay-at-home orders (SAHOs) have been implemented in most U.S. states to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. This paper quantifies the short-run impact of these containment policies on the supply of and demand for child care. The child care market may be particularly vulnerable to a SAHO-type policy shock, given that many providers are liquidity-constrained. Using plausibly exogenous variation from the staggered adoption of SAHOs across states, we find that online job postings for early care and education teachers declined by 13% after enactment. This effect is driven exclusively by private-sector services. Indeed, hiring by public programs like Head Start and pre-kindergarten has not been influenced by SAHOs. In addition, we find little evidence that child care search behavior among households has been altered. Because forced supply-side changes appear to be at play, our results suggest that households may not be well-equipped to insure against the rapid transition to the production of child care. We discuss the implications of these results for child development and parental employment decisions.

Keywords: early care and education; COVID-19; coronavirus; child care; stay-at-home orders (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H75 I28 J21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29 pages
Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published - published in: Economics of Education Review, 2021, 82, 102094

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13261.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. child care market: Evidence from stay-at-home orders (2021)
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:iza:izadps:dp13261

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().