EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Cost of Caring for Young Children

Dan Rosenbaum and Christopher Ruhm

No 11837, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This study examines the "cost burden" of child care, defined as day care expenses divided by after-tax income. Data are from the wave 10 core and child care topical modules to the 1996 Survey of Income and Program Participation. We estimate that the average child under six years of age lives in a family that spends 4.9 percent of after-tax income on day care. However, this conceals wide variation: 63 percent of such children reside in families with no child care expenses and 10 percent are in families where the cost burden exceeds 16 percent. The burden is typically greater in single-parent than married-couple families but is not systematically related to a measure of socioeconomic status that we construct. One reason for this is that disadvantaged families use lower cost modes and pay less per hour for given types of care. The cost burden would be much less equal without low cost (presumably subsidized) formal care focused on needy families, as well as government tax and transfer policies that redistribute income towards them.

JEL-codes: J13 J18 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-12
Note: CH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11837.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Cost of Caring for Young Children (2005) Downloads
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:nbr:nberwo:11837

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w11837

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:11837