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Kids to School and Moms to Work: New York City's Universal Pre-K Expansion and Mother's Employment
September 2025
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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The Effect of the Minimum Wage on Childcare Establishments
August 2025
Working Paper Number:
CES-25-53
Childcare is essential for working families, yet it remains increasingly unaffordable and inaccessible for parents and offers poverty-level wages to many employees. While research suggests minimum wage policies may improve the welfare of low-wage workers, there is also evidence they may increase firm exits, especially among smaller, low-profit firms, which could reduce access and harm consumer well-being. This study is the first to examine these trade-offs in the childcare industry, a labor-intensive, highly regulated sector where capital-labor substitution is limited, and to provide evidence on how minimum wage policies affect a dual-sector labor market in the U.S., where self-employed and waged providers serve overlapping markets. Using variation from state-level minimum wage increases between 1995 and 2019 and unique microdata, I implement a cross-state county border discontinuity design to estimate impacts on the stocks, flows, and composition of childcare establishments. I find that while county-level aggregate establishment stocks and employment remained stable, establishment-level turnover increased, and employment decreased. I reconcile these findings by showing that minimum wage increases prompted reallocation, with larger establishments in the waged-sector more likely to enter and less likely to exit, making this one of the first studies to link null aggregate effects to shifts in establishment composition. Finally, I show that minimum wage increases may negatively affect the self-employed sector, resulting in fewer owners with advanced degrees and more with only high school education. These findings suggest that minimum wage policies reshape who provides care in ways that could affect both quality and access.
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The Impact of Childcare Costs on Mothers' Labor Force Participation
April 2025
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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Estimating the Immediate Impact of the COVID-19 Shock on Parental Attachment to the Labor Market and the Double Bind of Mothers
July 2020
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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High Labor Force Attachment, but Few Social Ties? Life-Course Predictors of Women's Receipt of Childcare Subsidies
September 2019
Working Paper Number:
CES-19-26
The U.S. federal Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) childcare subsidy represents the largest source of means-tested assistance for U.S. families with low incomes. The CCDF subsidy aims to help mothers with low incomes gain employment and education, with implications for women's labor force participation, and the wellbeing of their children. Because recipients of the CCDF subsidy are either already employed, or seek the subsidy with the goal of gaining employment or schooling, this group may represent the public assistance recipients who are best able to succeed in the low-wage labor market. However, existing research on the CCDF observes recipients only after they begin receiving the subsidy, thus giving an incomplete picture of whether recipients may select into subsidy receipt, and how subsidy recipiency is situated in women's broader work and family trajectories. My study links administrative records from the CCDF to the American Community Survey (ACS) to construct a longitudinal data set from 38 states that observes CCDF recipients in the 1-2 years before they first received the subsidy. I compare women who subsequently received the CCDF subsidy to other women with low incomes in the ACS who did not go on to receive the subsidy, with a total of roughly 641,000 individuals. I find that CCDF recipients are generally positively-selected on employment history and educational attainment, but appear to have lower levels of social support than non-recipients.
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The Use of Administrative Records and the American Community Survey to Study the Characteristics of Undercounted Young Children in the 2010 Census
May 2018
Working Paper Number:
carra-2018-05
Children under age five are historically one of the most difficult segments of the population to enumerate in the U.S. decennial census. The persistent undercount of young children is highest among Hispanics and racial minorities. In this study, we link 2010 Census data to administrative records from government and third party data sources, such as Medicaid enrollment data and tenant rental assistance program records from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to identify differences between children reported and not reported in the 2010 Census. In addition, we link children in administrative records to the American Community Survey to identify various characteristics of households with children under age five who may have been missed in the last census. This research contributes to what is known about the demographic, socioeconomic, and household characteristics of young children undercounted by the census. Our research also informs the potential benefits of using administrative records and surveys to supplement the U.S. Census Bureau child population enumeration efforts in future decennial censuses.
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Head Start and Mothers' Work: Free Child Care or Something More?
March 2018
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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Is Subsidized Childcare Associated with Lower Risk of Grade Retention for Low-Income Children? Evidence from Child Care and Development Fund Administrative Records Linked to the American Community Survey
June 2017
Working Paper Number:
carra-2017-06
This study investigates whether low-income young children's experience of Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF)-subsidized childcare is associated with a lower subsequent likelihood of being held back in grades K-12. High-quality childcare has been shown to improve low-income children's school readiness. However, no previous study has examined the link specifically between subsidized care and grade retention. I do so here by matching information on children from CCDF administrative records to later observations of the same children in the American Community Survey (ACS). I use logistic regression to compare the likelihood of grade retention between CCDF-recipient children and non-recipient children who also appear in the ACS in the years 2008-2014 (N=2,284,857). I find strong evidence for an association between CCDF-subsidized care and lower risk of grade retention, especially among non-Hispanic Black children and Hispanic children. I also find evidence that receiving CCDF-subsidized center-based care in particular is associated with a lower risk of being held back than CCDF-subsidized family daycare, babysitter care, or relative care, again with the largest apparent benefit to non-Hispanic Black children and Hispanic children.
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DOES FAMILY PLANNING INCREASE CHILDREN'S OPPORTUNITIES?
EVIDENCE FROM THE WAR ON POVERTY AND THE EARLY YEARS OF TITLE X
January 2016
Working Paper Number:
CES-16-29
This paper examines the relationship between parents' access to family planning and the economic resources of the average child. Using the county-level introduction of U.S. family planning programs between 1964 and 1973, we find that children born after programs began had 2.5% higher household incomes. They were also 7% less likely to live in poverty and 11% less likely to live in households receiving public assistance. Even with extreme assumptions about selection, these estimates are large enough to imply that family planning programs directly increased children's resources, including increases in mothers' paid work and increased childbearing within marriage.
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Is there an Advantage to Working? The Relationship between Maternal Employment and Intergenerational Mobility
September 2015
Working Paper Number:
CES-15-27
We investigate the question of whether investing in a child's development by having a parent stay at home when the child is young is correlated with the child's adult outcomes. Specifically, do children with stay-at-home mothers have higher adult earnings than children raised in households with a working mother? The major contribution of our study is that, unlike previous studies, we have access to rich longitudinal data that allows us to measure both the parental earnings when the child is very young and the adult earnings of the child. Our findings are consistent with previous studies that show insignificant differences between children raised by stay-at-home mothers during their early years and children with mothers working in the market. We find no impact of maternal employment during the first 5 years of a child's life on earnings, employment, or mobility measures of either sons or daughters. We do find, however, that maternal employment during children's high school years is correlated with a higher probability of employment as adults for daughters and a higher correlation between parent and daughter earnings ranks.
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