Childcare Availability, Household Structure, and Maternal Employment

Shintaro Yamaguchi ()
Additional contact information
Shintaro Yamaguchi: Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo, Postal: Department of Economics, McMaster University, 1280 Main St. W., Hamilton, ON. Canada L8S 4M4.
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Yukiko Asai and Shintaro Yamaguchi

No f171, ISS Discussion Paper Series (series F) from Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo

Abstract: We estimate the causal effects of childcare availability on the maternal employment rate using prefecture panel data constructed from the Japanese quinquennial census 1990-2010. We depart from previous papers on Japan by controlling for prefecture fixed effects, without which the estimates can be severely biased upward. Contrary to popular belief, childcare availability is uncorrelated with maternal employment when prefecture fixed effects are controlled. Evidence suggests that this is because households shift from using informal childcare provided by grandparents to the accredited childcare service, as more and more households do not live with grandparents. If this change of the household structure did not occur, the growth of childcare availability would have increased the maternal employment rate by two percentage points, which accounts for about 30% of the growth in the maternal employment rate from 1990 to 2010.

Keywords: childcare; female labor supply; maternal employment; nuclear family; three-generation family (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 J21 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 35 pages
Date: 2014-09-11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/publishments/dpf/pdf/f-171.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Childcare availability, household structure, and maternal employment (2015)
Working Paper: Childcare Availability, Household Structure, and Maternal Employment (2014)
Working Paper: Childcare Availability, Household Structure, and Maternal Employment (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:itk:issdps:f171

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISS Discussion Paper Series (series F) from Institute of Social Science, The University of Tokyo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().