Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/216088 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Series/Report no.: 
GLO Discussion Paper No. 525
Publisher: 
Global Labor Organization (GLO), Essen
Abstract: 
Ample empirical evidence has found that access to childcare for preschool children increases mothers’ labor force participation and employment. In this paper, we investigate whether increased childcare for primary school children improves the quality of jobs mothers find by estimating the causal effect of a school schedule reform in Chile. Combining plausibly exogenous temporal and spatial variations in school schedules with a panel of individual mothers’ employment between 2002 and 2015, we estimated a fixed-effects model that controlled for unobserved heterogeneity. We found a positive effect of access to full-day schools on several measures of ’the quality of mothers’ jobs, which were correlated to working full-time. We also found small, positive effects on quality of fathers’ jobs. Our evidence suggests that the mechanism driving the effect was the effect of the reform’s implicit subsidy to the cost of childcare on the opportunity cost of mothers’ time. We also found that less educated mothers benefited most from the reform. Thus, childcare can increase household welfare by improving parents’ jobs and can play a role in reducing inequality.
Subjects: 
Employment quality
job quality
women’s labor force participation
women’s labor supply
full-day schooling
childcare
education reform
Chile
JEL: 
H41
H52
I25
I28
J13
J16
J18
J22
O15
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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