This paper examines the relationship between the cost of child care and the employment behavior of married and single mothers. The data used in this paper are from the 1987 SIPP, the first SIPP panel to utilize an improved probing of child care usage and expenditures. A primary contribution of...

According to the intertemporal-substitution hypothesis, which underlies the typical empirical real business cycle model, cyclical fluctuations in employment and hours of work are optimizing labor-supply responses to short-run aggregate demand shifts. We demonstrate that previous empirical...

This paper considers the effect of child care costs on two labor market outcomes for single mothers whether to participate in the labor market and whether to receive welfare. Hourly child care expenditures are estimated for all women in the sample (using data drawn from the 1992 and 1993 panels...