Public Childcare, Labor Market Outcomes of Caregivers, and Child Development: Experimental Evidence from Brazil

The Effects of Childcare on Women and Children: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in Burkina Faso

“…Without an explicitly-designed comparison group, it is difficult to know whether differences in observed outcomes truly reflect the causal effects of access to childcare centers or partly result from preexisting care on children's development outcomes in other developing economies (for example, Rosero and Oosterbeek (2011) in Ecuador; Bernal et al (2019) in Colombia; and Blimpo et al (Forthcoming) in Gambia). Other studies find significant positive effects (Martinez, Naudeau and Pereira (2017) in Mozambique; Hojman and López Bóo (2019) in Nicaragua; Dean and Jayachandran (2020) in India; Attanasio et al (2022) in Brazil; and Bjorvatn et al (2022) in Uganda). The range in effects largely depends on the quality of available alternatives and researchers generally find more positive effects for children from underprivileged households.…”

Universal Investments in Toddler Health. Learning from a Large Government Trial

“…Infant mortality, in particular deaths from infectious diseases, had declined significantly to around two percent in 1960 (Det Statistiske Departement, 1964). In this low-infant mortal- health, and nutritional inputs for families (Rossin-Slater and Wüst, 2020;Attanasio et al, 2022). In our analyses, we discuss the relevance of this factor, which impacted increasing shares of children in both the treatment and control group across trial cohorts.…”

Early Child Care and Labor Supply of Lower-Ses Mothers: A Randomized Controlled Trial

“…In many countries, universal child care programs are available nationwide, highlighting the potential scalability of our results. Closest to our study, the working paper by Attanasio et al (2022) analyzes a lottery conducted by the government of Rio de Janeiro that randomly assigned slots in early public child care. The authors find no effects of winning the lottery on the labor supply of parents, but they do find an increase in the labor supply of grandparents living with the child (which is common in the Brazilian context).…”

“…In the development context,Bjorvatn et al (2022) show that offering families in Uganda child care subsidies without additional cash transfers has no impact on maternal labor supply.7 In general, the evidence from developing countries on how child care affects mothers is somewhat mixed. In contrast toAttanasio et al (2022),Clark et al (2019) andAjayi et al (2022) find positive effects of early child care access on mothers' labor market outcomes in Kenya and Burkina Faso, respectively.8 Following the literature, we also use the term "child penalty" for conceptual accuracy. The term is sometimes criticized for its normative connotation(Berniell et al, 2021), and we do not mean to imply any value judgment regarding children or labor market decisions by using the term.…”