EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Distributional and Behavioural Effects of Child Care Subsidies

Thor Thoresen

Discussion Papers from Statistics Norway, Research Department

Abstract: A methodology to describe the distributional and behavioural effects of child care subsidies is presented within a micro simulation framework. We discuss the effects of changing the governmental policy to support families with preschool children, from today's subsidisation of spaces at child care centres to an equal cash transfer to all families with preschoolers. In the decision model applied (Michalopoulos et al. 1992) the mother chooses consumption, market time and average quality of child care. The model is adjusted to the Norwegian child care market and data for mothers who both are employed and receiving child care subsidies (1990) are used, since this group of mothers is assumed to respond most to the reform. Weaknesses in data and simplifying model assumptions imply that the results must be used with caution. Results from our simulation experiment do not indicate any large decrease in mothers labour supply, when altering the transfer system. The reform will give a substantial decrease in inequality among households with preschoolers, since the child care subsidies very much favour well-off households.

Keywords: Child care; distribution; household behaviour; inequality; labour supply; micro simulation; subsidies. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 D31 D63 H23 J13 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1995-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ssb.no/a/publikasjoner/pdf/DP/dp_135.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:ssb:dispap:135

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Statistics Norway, Research Department P.O.Box 8131 Dep, N-0033 Oslo, Norway. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by L Maasø ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-01
Handle: RePEc:ssb:dispap:135