This paper empirically examines the effect on couples’ labour supply of a universal at-birth cash benefit and a government subsidy equal to 50% of child care expenditure for working parents. The method is first to simulate the effects on labour supply over the adult lifecycle using a...

Child care workers receive low hourly pay, modest returns to education, experience and job tenure, and have high rates of turnover. These stylized facts have caused analysts to characterize child care workers as secondary labour market participants. We use Canadian data to challenge this...

Despite the increasing prevalence of nonparental child care, many parents in the United States care exclusively for their young children, even when both parents work. We examine reasons for non-consumption of child care by estimating double-hurdle, tobit and dominance models of the demand for...

The trade-off between parents' time with their own kids and market work, and its dependence on out-of-home day care is analyzed in a simultaneous equation framework. Economic incentives primarily work through decisions about market work, while the direct effects on time with children are weak....

Public employment growth has been parallelled by increased female labour force participation, while real wages for typical female public sector occupations have not increased. In a theoretical model we, first, show that there is a tradeoff between day care provision and gross wages for...

This paper examines employment and child-care choices of single-parent families with young children in the United States and Canada, using a pooled data set based on recent national surveys in each country. We find that the employment and child-care choices of Canadian families are similar to...