Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/314622 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 17725
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
The composition and quality of the child care workforce may be uniquely sensitive to changes in the complementarities between home production and market work. This paper examines whether the expansion of oral contraceptives and abortion access throughout the 1960's and 1970's influenced the composition, quality, and wages of the child care workforce. Leveraging state-by-birth cohort variation in access to these reproductive technologies, we find that they significantly altered the educational profile of child care workers—increasing the proportion of less-educated women in the sector while reducing the share of highly-educated workers. This shift led to a decline in average education levels and wages within the child care workforce. Furthermore, access to the pill and abortion influenced child care employment differently across settings, with center-based providers losing more high-skilled workers to alternatives with better career opportunities, and home-based and private household providers absorbing more low-skilled women, for whom child care may have remained a viable employment destination. Overall, our findings indicate that increased reproductive autonomy, while expanding women's access to higher-skilled and -paying professions, also resulted in a redistribution of skilled labor away from child care, which may have implications for service quality, child development, and parental employment.
Subjects: 
abortion
child care
pill
contraceptive
reproductive technology
JEL: 
I21
I38
J13
J22
J24
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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