Public Childcare, Labor Market Outcomes of Caregivers, and Child Development: Experimental Evidence from Brazil

Orazio Attanasio (), Ricardo Paes de Barros (), Pedro Carneiro, David Evans, Lycia Lima, Pedro Olinto and Norbert Schady
Additional contact information
Orazio Attanasio: Yale University
Ricardo Paes de Barros: Insper, São Paulo
Lycia Lima: Sao Paulo School of Economics

No 15705, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This study examines the impact of publicly provided daycare for children aged 0-3 on outcomes of children and their caregivers over the course of seven years after enrollment into daycare. At the end of 2007, the city of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil used a lottery to assign children to limited public daycare openings. Winning the lottery translated to a 34 percent increase in time in daycare during a child's first four years of life. This allowed caregivers more time to work, resulting in higher incomes for beneciary households in the first year of daycare attendance and 4 years later (but not after 7 years, by which time all children were eligible for universal schooling). The rise in labor force participation is driven primarily by grandparents and by adolescent siblings residing in the same household as (and possibly caring for) the child, and not by parents, most of whom were already working. Beneciary children saw sustained gains in height-for-age and weight-for-age, due to better nutritional intake at school and at home. Gains in beneciary children's cognitive development were observed 4 years after enrolment but not later.

Keywords: early child development; childcare; Brazil (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I28 J22 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55 pages
Date: 2022-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-lam, nep-lma and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp15705.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Public Childcare, Labor Market Outcomes of Caregivers, and Child Development: Experimental Evidence from Brazil (2022)
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:dp15705

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 ().