The Impact of Federal Nutrition Support for Infants and Young Children on Home Daycare Services

Elizabeth Powers () and Jian Zou ()
Additional contact information
Elizabeth Powers: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Jian Zou: Cornell University

No 18872, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: Many small, home-based, childcare businesses participate in the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP). This large but little-studied federal program provides fixed reimbursements for food costs to support nutrient-dense meals and snacks for young children in out-of-home care. We use unique, richly detailed administrative data and a policy reform that exogenously increased some providers’ reimbursements to estimate causal effects of CACFP on childcare services. An own-price effect on food service, a positive effect on complementary services, and a possible pass-through of reimbursements in prices are predicted. There is suggestive evidence of price increases for the care of very young children and for before-and-after-school care. We fail to find significant effects on indicators of provider quality. In a heterogeneity analysis, there are no differences in response by child poverty. In contrast, significant findings on dinner and duration in the sample are driven by the non-rural providers. Overall, CACFP may especially benefit low-income households by increasing opportunities to receive subsidized food away from home and better accommodating lengthy work days and nonstandard schedules.

Keywords: child care; subsidies; Child and Adult Care Food Program; daycare home services (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H51 I18 I38 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-08
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp18872.pdf (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:iza:izadps:dp18872

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Fallak ().