Volume 27, Number 1 (Winter) 1992
Ribar, David C. 1992. "Child Care and the Labor Supply of Married Women: Reduced Form Evidence." Journal of Human Resources 27(1):134-165.
This paper empirically analyzes family demands for market and nonmarket child care services and the impact of these demands on the work effort of married women. The paper first develops a general model of child care and labor force participation. The model predicts that higher wages increase the likelihood of labor force participation and that higher costs decrease the likelihood of child care utilization. The paper then develops a three-equation, reduced-form econometric specification of the general model. The equations in the specification are estimated simultaneously using 1985 data from the Survey of Income Program Participation. The estimates reveal that the cost of market child care has a strong negative effect on the labor supply of married women.
The author is an assistant professor of economics at the Pennsylvania State University. He would like to thank Vernon Henderson, Tony Lancaster, Mark Pitt, Anu Rangarajan, participants of the brown University microeconomics workshop, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions. He takes responsibility for any remaining errors. Financial assistance was provided by the U.S. Department of Labor under dissertation grant number 99-9-3545-98-078-04. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning in June 1992 through August 1995 from the author at the following address: Department of Economics, 608 Kern Graduate Building, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802.
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