Rachel Connelly

THE EFFECT OF CHILD CARE COSTS ON MARRIED WOMEN'S LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION

The effect of child-care costs on the probability that married women with children will participate in the labor market is examined. Child-care costs are estimated.using a generalized Tobit specification corrected for selection. Estimates of a structural probit model of labor-force participation provide evidence to support the prediction that increased child-care costs lower the probability of participation. It is also shown that the lower rate of labor-force participation among mothers of preschoolers is entirely the result of the higher child-care costs faced by these women and endogeneity of the number of young children in the participation equation. Copyright 1992 by MIT Press.

Mothers’ Time Choices Caregiving, Leisure, Home Production, and Paid Work

Using data from the 2003 and 2004 American Time Use Survey, we study the role that socioeconomic factors play in mothers’ time choices. We estimate a four-equation system in which the dependent variables are the minutes used in home production, active leisure, market work, and child caregiving. Our results show that mothers’ caregiving time increases with the number of children, decreases with age of the child, and increases with the price of child care. We also find a substantial positive wage elasticity for caregiving time, while both leisure and home production time declines with increased wages.

Determinants of School Enrollment and Completion of 10 to 18 Year Olds in China.

Abstract This paper provides an analysis of school enrollment and graduation rates in China using the 1990 Chinese Census. Five education milestones: (1) entering primary school, (2) graduating from primary school, (3) entering middle school, (4) graduating from middle school and (5) entering high school, are analyzed. Location of residence and sex are shown to be highly correlated with enrollment and graduation, with rural girls being especially disadvantaged in terms of both enrollment and graduation rates. Parental education, the presence of siblings, county level income and village level in-school rates also have consistent effects on enrollment and graduation milestones.

Self-Employment and Providing Child Care.

This paper considers self-employment and providing child care as occupational strategies that can lower the cost of child care. If the ability to care for one’s own children while engaged in market work is important to mothers with young children, we predict that women with young children will be more likely to choose to be self-employed or to be a child care provider than women without young children. The analysis provides strong support for this hypothesis, The results show that the presence of young children is an important factor in choosing self-employment and in choosing to be a child care provider. Finally, simulations are presented which show that a woman’s choice among these sectors is quite sensitive to the number and ages of her young children.

Women's Employment and Child Care in Brazil

This study describes and tests a theoretical model of the relationship between womens employment and child care decisions in metropolitan Brazil. Results are considered as supportive of the hypothesis that womens employment and child care are competing uses of womens time. This article provides a description of the Brazilian context and a brief literature review a theoretical framework and hypotheses estimation methods data and variables and empirical modeling. Findings indicate that maternal employment status was an important determinant of the demand for nonparental child care for young children. Child quality issues appeared to be more important factors in the choice of part-time nonparental child care than full-time nonparental care. Increased income was related to the decreased probability of womens employment but increased the probability of nonparental child care. The probability of womens employment and nonparental child care was affected by the presence of potential alternative care givers in the household. Females and particularly female teenaged relatives were more likely to serve as maternal child care substitutes in the home. Working age females were more likely to serve as labor force substitutes than younger or older females. Although the 1988 Brazilian constitution mandates free day care and preschool for all 0-6 year olds programs have not been implemented. The findings suggest a need for nonparental child care and consideration of the trade-offs that families make in substituting female teenagers as parental child care providers which jeopardizes their educational advancement.

Childcare, Eldercare, and Labor Force Participation of Married Women in Urban China: 1982-2000

We employ Chinese population census data to consider married, urban womens labor force participation decisions in the context of their families. We find that the presence in the household of a parent, parent-in-law, or person aged 75 or older increases prime-age womens likelihood of participating in market work. The presence of preschool-aged children decreases it. The negative effect on womens labor force participation of having young children in the household is substantially larger for married, rural-to-urban migrants than for their nonmigrant counterparts. Similarly, the positive effect of coresidence with elders is larger for rural-to-urban migrant women than for nonmigrants.

The Effect of Child Care Costs on the Employment and Welfare Recipiency of Single Mothers

This paper considers the effect of child care costs on two labor market outcomes for single mothers—whether to work for pay and whether to receive welfare. Hourly child care expenditures are estimated using data drawn from the 1992 and 1993 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). These expenditures are then used to predict the probability of welfare recipiency and employment. While the direction and significance of key variables are robust to changes in specification, the quantitative results are found to be sensitive to identification restrictions. All results show a substantial positive effect of child care costs on welfare recipiency, with the child care price elasticity of welfare recipiency varying from 1.0 to 1.9. Similarly, we find a significant negative effect of child care price on employment with elasticity estimates from ?.3 to ?1.1, showing that controlling for the welfare choice does not reduce the price elasticity of employment found in other studies.

A Framework for Analyzing the Impact of Cohort Size on Education and Labor Earning.

The paper analyzes three models of labor demand solving for the change in wages of a given labor group due to a change in the size of a birth cohort. When the production function includes age-schooling groups as separate factors, an increase in the size of one birth cohort changes the size of several labor market groups. Also, in this case, the demand effect of changing factor size is joined by a supply effect of changing schooling proportions. Ignoring the supply effect may cause us to overestimate the effect of a large birth cohort on wages of young skilled workers.

The settlement of rural migrants in urban China – some of China's migrants are not ‘floating’ anymore

This paper considers economic models of migration in the context of current Chinese migration. We argue that using formally changing ones household registration (hukou) location is too narrow a definition of settlement for policy purposes. Instead we show that time in the city and co-residence with spouses and separately with children reveals systematic settlement behavior on the part of a subset of migrants. The empirical evidence offered is largely descriptive but shows that those migrants who were younger at the age of migration, who are currently married and self-employed spend more years in the city. Men who have been in the city longer and are self-employed are much more likely to be co-residing with their wife. Self-employment is also a predictor of co-residence with children for both mothers and fathers.

The Impact of Circular Migration on the Position of Married Women in Rural China

Abstract This study examines the impact of migration on womens positions in Chinese rural households. A number of studies have found that rural Chinese migrant women experience more autonomy and freedom in urban areas than they would at home. But do these experiences carry over into marriage when they return to rural areas? Using a survey of more than 3,000 married, rural women in Anhui and Sichuan provinces and controlling for potential endogeneity of migration and return, this paper explores four main categories of womens status: womens views on male/female relationships, womens roles in household decision making, womens relationships with their husbands, and womens views concerning parents and children. It concludes that for women from Anhui and Sichuan, migration has some statistically significant lasting effects on a womans position in the household, though the effects are not always positive, nor are they universal.