Is Universal Child Care Leveling the Playing Field?

By Tarjei Havnes, Magne Mogstad. Social Science Research Network, 2015

359 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Many developed countries currently consider a move towards a universal child care program. The challenge in assessing the case for universal child care programs is that the evidence base is scarce. We analyze the staged expansion of subsidized, universally accessible child care in Norway. Our approach differs from existing literature which estimate mean impacts of universal child care programs; in contrast, we use non-linear difference-in-differences methods to estimate quantile treatment effects, showing how the child care expansion affected the earnings distribution of exposed children as adults. We complement these estimates with local linear regressions of the child care effects by family income. Our findings suggest that the effects of child care vary systematically across the earnings distribution, that the mean impact misses a lot, and that children of low income parents seem to be the primary beneficiaries of subsidized child care. These findings are important when considering the case for universal child care programs, since the benefits of providing subsidized child care to middle and upper-class children are unlikely to exceed the costs. To help understand the differential effects on earnings, we examine how the child care expansion affected the educational trajectories and cognitive test scores of the exposed children.

Subfields: Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b38a923909bede86b0903ca08016b613f57aae20

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

1. Magne Mogstad
2. Tarjei Havnes
3. W. Van Lancker

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Magne Mogstad
2. Tarjei Havnes
3. W. Van Lancker

Citations in the corpus

• Community Colleges and Upward Mobility (2019, neutral): “complier-describing logic of Imbens and Rubin (1997), Abadie (2002), and Carneiro and Lee (2009) to multiple margins of treatment and instrument compliance: the data do not directly reveal which individuals are compliers, nor the treatment margin along which they would comply, but the distributional”
• The Estimation of Causal Effects by Difference-in-Difference Methods (2011, neutral): “" A similar observation has been made by Heckman (1996) in his discussion of a paper by Eissa (1996).”
• Childhood Circumstances and Adult Outcomes: Act II (2018, neutral): “Havnes and Mogstad (2015) examine the effect of a Norwegian reform that extended publicly funded preschools.”
• No Child Left Behind: Subsidized Child Care and Children's Long-Run Outcomes (2011, background): “Loeb et al. (2007), for instance, find that pre-primary education in the US is associated with improved reading and mathematics skills at primary school entry.”