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The Effect of the Minimum Wage on Childcare Establishments

August 2025

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The 10 most similar working papers to the working paper 'The Effect of the Minimum Wage on Childcare Establishments' are listed below in order of similarity.

• Working Paper

  🔥

  
  
  The Impact of Childcare Costs on Mothers' Labor Force Participation
  

  April 2025

  Authors: Danielle H. Sandler, Linden McBride, Valeska Araujo

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-25-25

  The rising costs of childcare pose challenges for families, leading to difficult choices including those impacting mothers' labor force participation. This paper investigates the relationship between childcare costs and maternal employment. Using data from the National Database of Childcare Prices, the American Community Survey, and the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics, we estimate the impact of childcare costs on mothers' labor force participation through two empirical strategies. A fixed-effects approach controls for geographic and temporal heterogeneity in costs as well as mothers' idiosyncratic preferences for work and childcare, while an instrumental variables approach addresses the endogeneity of mothers' preferences for work and childcare by leveraging exogenous geographic and temporal variation in childcare licensing requirements. Our findings across both research designs indicate that higher childcare costs reduce labor force participation among mothers, with lower-income mothers exhibiting greater responsiveness to changes in childcare costs.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Kids to School and Moms to Work: New York City's Universal Pre-K Expansion and Mother's Employment
  

  September 2025

  Authors: Laxman Timilsina

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-25-62

  Using the restricted data from American Community Survey from 2011 to 2017, this paper examines the impact of New York City's (NYC) expansion of universal pre-kindergarten (UPK) on labor force participation of mothers with the youngest child of 4 years of age. Starting in Fall of 2014, any child who is 4 years old and residing in NYC for the past year is eligible for UPK for the academic year, for example all children born in 2010 would qualify for the academic year 2014-15. It uses a triple-difference approach - first compare mothers in NYC with the youngest child of 4-year-olds (treated mothers) to mothers with the youngest child of 5 and 6-year-olds (control mothers) before and after the program. Next, it compares this difference with mothers living in adjacent counties in the New York Metropolitan Area (NMA) in New York to NYC. I find that the program increased mothers' labor force participation by 5 percentage points (a 7.5 percent impact) in NYC. The results are robust to various robustness checks like comparing with mothers living in all of NMA and mothers in Philadelphia.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  The Impact of Minimum Quality Standards on Firm Entry, Exit and Product Quality: The Case of the Child Care Market
  

  December 2005

  Authors: V. Joseph Hotz, Mo Xiao

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-05-28

  We examine the impact of minimum quality standards on the supply side of the child care market, using a unique panel data set merged from the Census of Services Industries, state regulation data, and administrative accreditation records from the National Association of Education for Young Children. We control for state-specific and time-specific fixed effects in order to mitigate the biases associated with policy endogeneity. We find that the effects of quality standards specifying the labor intensiveness of child care services are strikingly different from those specifying staff qualifications. Higher staff-child ratio requirements deter entry and reduce the number of operating child care establishments. This entry barrier appears to select establishments with better quality into the market and alleviates competition among existing establishments: existing establishments are more likely to receive accreditation and higher profits, and are less likely to exit. By contrast, higher staff-education requirements do not have entry-deterrence effects. They do have the unintended effects of discouraging accreditation, reducing owners' profits, and driving firms out of businesses.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Preschoolers Enrolled and Mothers at Work? The Effects of Universal Pre-Kindergarten
  

  March 2008

  Authors: Maria Fitzpatrick

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-08-04

  Three states (Georgia, Oklahoma and Florida) recently introduced Universal Pre- Kindergarten (Universal Pre-K) programs offering free preschool to all age-eligible children, and policy makers in many other states are promoting similar policies. How do such policies affect the participation of children in preschool programs (or do they merely substitute for preschool offered by the market)? Does the implicit child care subsidy afforded by Universal Pre-K change maternal labor supply? I present a model that includes preferences for child quality and shows the directions of change in preschool enrollment and maternal labor supply in response to Universal Pre-K programs are theoretically ambiguous. Using restricted-access data from the Census, together with year and birthday based eligibility cutoffs, I employ a regression discontinuity framework to estimate the effects of Universal Pre-K availability. Universal Pre-K availability increases preschool enrollment by 12 to 15 percent, with the largest effect on children of women with less than a Bachelor's Degree. Universal Pre-K availability has little effect on the labor supply of most women. However, women residing in rural areas in Georgia increase their children's preschool enrollment and their own employment by 22 and 20 percent, respectively, when Universal Pre-K is available.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Estimating the Immediate Impact of the COVID-19 Shock on Parental Attachment to the Labor Market and the Double Bind of Mothers
  

  July 2020

  Authors: Misty L. Heggeness

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-20-22R

  I examine the impact of the COVID-19 shock on parents' labor supply during the initial stages of the pandemic. Using difference-in-difference approaches and monthly panel data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), I compare labor market attachment, non-work activity, hours worked, and earnings and wages of those in areas with early school closures and stay-in-place orders with those in areas with delayed or no pandemic closures. While there was no immediate impact on detachment or unemployment, mothers with jobs in early closure states were 53.2 percent more likely than mothers in late closure states to have a job but not be working as a result of early shutdowns. There was no effect on working fathers or working women without school age children. Of mothers who continued working, those in early closure states worked more weekly hours than mothers in late closure states; fathers reduced their hours. Overall, the pandemic appears to have induced a unique immediate juggling act for working mothers of school age children.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Spillovers From Costly Credit
  

  March 2013

  Authors: Brian T. Melzer

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-13-11

  Recent research on the effects of credit access among low- and moderate-income households finds that high-cost payday loans exacerbate, rather than alleviate, financial distress for a subset of borrowers (Melzer 2011; Skiba and Tobacman 2011). In this study I find that others, outside the borrowing household, bear a portion of these costs too: households with payday loan access are 20% more likely to use food assistance benefits and 10% less likely to make child support payments required of non-resident parents. These findings suggest that as borrowers accommodate interest and principal payments on payday loan debt, they prioritize loan payments over other liabilities like child support payments and they turn to transfer programs like food stamps to supplement the household's resources. To establish this finding, the analysis uses a measure of payday loan access that is robust to the concern that lender location decisions and state policies governing payday lending are endogenous relative to household financial condition. The analysis also confirms that the effect is absent in the mid-1990s, prior to the spread of payday lending, and that the effect grows over time, in parallel with the growth of payday lending.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Head Start and Mothers' Work: Free Child Care or Something More?
  

  March 2018

  Authors: Ariel Marek Pihl

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-18-13

  Head Start is the largest public pre-school program in the US, but it provides many additional services to families. This paper uses a discontinuity in grant writing assistance in the first year of the Head Start program to identify impacts on the work and welfare usage of mothers. Using restricted Decennial Census and administrative AFDC data I find that Head Start decreases employment rates and hours worked per week for single mothers. I also find a suggestive increase in welfare receipt for single mothers which is confirmed by an increase in the share of administrative welfare case-files that are single mother households. For all mothers combined there are no significant changes in work or welfare use. I also estimate long-run impacts, 10 years after a woman's child was eligible for Head Start. I find large and persistent declines in work for both non-white mothers and single mothers, accompanied by an increase in public assistance income and return to school. I argue that this is consistent with the 1960's era Head Start program's focus on encouraging quality parenting, parent participation and helping families access all benefits for which they were eligible.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Introduction of Head Start and Maternal Labor Supply: Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design
  

  January 2016

  Authors: Cuiping Long

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-16-35

  I use the non-public decennial censuses in 1970 to investigate the effect of the Head Start program on maternal labor supply and schooling in its early years. I exploit a discontinuity in county-level Head Start funding beginning in the late 1960s to explore differences in countylevel maternal employment and maternal schooling. The results provide suggestive evidence that the more availability of Head Start led to an increase the nursery school enrollment of children and a decrease in maternal labor supply. In addition, the ITT estimates imply a relatively large, negative effect of enrollment on maternal labor supply. However, the estimates are somewhat sensitive to addition of covariates and the standard errors are also large to draw firm inferences.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  The Transitional Costs of Sectoral Reallocation: Evidence from the Clean Air Act and the Workforce
  

  January 2012

  Authors: William Walker

  Working Paper Number:

  CES-12-02

  New environmental regulations lead to a rearrangement of production away from polluting industries, and workers in those industries are adversely affected. This paper uses linked worker-firm data in the United States to estimate the transitional costs associated with reallocating workers from newly regulated industries to other sectors of the economy. The focus on workers rather than industries as the unit of analysis allows me to examine previously unobserved economic outcomes such as non-employment and long run earnings losses from job transitions, both of which are critical to understanding the reallocative costs associated with these policies. Using panel variation induced by the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA), I find that the reallocative costs of environmental policy are significant. Workers in newly regulated plants experienced, in aggregate, more than $9 billion inforegone earnings for the years after the change in policy. Most of these costs are driven by non-employment and lower earnings in future employment, while earnings of workers who remain with their firm change little. Relative to the estimated benefits of the 1990 CAAA, these one-time transitional costs are small. However, the estimated costs far exceed the workforce compensation policies designed to mitigate some of these earnings losses.
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• Working Paper

  
  
  Employer Dominance and Worker Earnings in Finance
  

  August 2024

  Authors: Wenting Ma

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  CES-24-41

  Large firms in the U.S. financial system achieve substantial economic gains. Their dominance sets them apart while also raising concerns about the suppression of worker earnings. Utilizing administrative data, this study reveals that the largest financial firms pay workers an average of 30.2% more than their smallest counterparts, significantly exceeding the 7.9% disparity in nonfinance sectors. This positive size-earnings relationship is consistently more pronounced in finance, even during the 2008 crisis or compared to the hightech sector. Evidence suggests that large financial firms' excessive gains, coupled with their workers' sought-after skills, explain this distinct relationship.
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