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Does child care availability play a role in maternal employment and children’s development? Evidence from Italy

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Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of public child care availability in Italy in mothers’ working status and children’s scholastic achievements. We use a newly available dataset containing individual standardized test scores of pupils attending the second grade of primary school in 2009–2010 in conjunction with data on public child care availability. Our estimates indicate a positive and significant effects of child care availability on both mothers’ working status and children’s Language test scores. We find that a percentage change in public child care coverage increases mothers’ probability to work by 1.3 percentage points and children’s Language test scores by 0.85 percent of one standard deviation; we do not find any effect on Math test scores. Moreover, the impact of a percentage change in public child care on mothers’ employment and children’s Language test scores is greater in provinces where child care availability is more limited.

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Notes

  1. Data from Eurostat referred to 2009.

  2. According to data from OECD Family Database for 2005, public expenditure on child care and early education services in Italy is equivalent to 0.6 % of GDP, while this figure for France, Sweden and Denmark is higher than 1 % (OECD 2010).

  3. See Blau and Currie (2006) and Ruhm (2004) for excellent surveys.

  4. To date, in Italy there are 8,092 municipalities in 20 regions.

  5. Law N. 285/1997 established a National Fund for Early Childhood and Adolescence allowing also the private and third sectors to provide child care services, while Law 448/2001 (Budget Law 2002) defined formal child care as “structures aimed at granting the development and socialization of girls and boys aged between 3 months and 3 years and to support families and parents with young children”.

  6. National Law 104/1992.

  7. We thank an anonymous referee for suggesting this methodology.

  8. The INVALSI wave 2009–2010 that we are using actually contains a question regarding individual child care attendance during infancy. However, this information cannot be used in a credible manner, since it is characterized by almost 40 % of missing values.

  9. In Italy there can be three types of child care provision: the first one refers to the cases where the public entity (i.e, the municipality) is both the owner and the provider of the service; the second, instead, refers to the cases where the municipality is the owner of the facility but outsources the provision of the service to other private entities; finally, there may be some cases where the private sector is both the owner and the provider of the service. For this analysis we use data concerning the first type of management.

  10. The other official sources of information on child care coverage at aggregate level are ISTAT (Italian National Statistical Institute) and Istituto Degli Innocenti, but both provide information only at regional level for the period relevant for this study.

  11. The dummy variable “Child missing information” indicates whether a child’s gender or citizenship is not available in the data; the dummy variable “Family missing information” is equal to one if a mother’s or a father’s employment or education are missing.

  12. Concerning the estimation on mothers’ working status, results do not differ using probit or logit instead of OLS and GLS. Results are available upon request from the authors. When estimating the mothers’ work equation with OLS and GLS we also correct the standard errors for heteroskedasticity.

  13. We assume that one more public child care center corresponds, on average, to 0.5 private child care center.

  14. We also performed a robustness check (not reported here) excluding provinces in the Emilia Romagna region, which is characterized by very high child care availability with respect to other regions and with respect to the Italian average. Results are very close to the ones presented in Table 6, panel (c).

  15. INVALSI data provide information on whether the child is regular in his school path or held back before or enrolled in a higher grade with respect to children of the same age.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge financial support from Collegio Carlo Alberto (project “Parental and Public Investments and Child Outcomes”) and from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement no. 320116 for the research project FamiliesAndSocieties. We would like to thank Christopher Flinn, Cristian Bartolucci, Ignacio Monzon, Francesco Figari, Mario Pagliero, Vincenzo Galasso, Daniela Vuri, Elena Meschi, Claudio Lucifora, Marco Francesconi, Chiara Monfardini and Silvia Pasqua and seminar participants at DONDENA (Bocconi University), CHILD and 4th IDW (Collegio Carlo Alberto), NYU, CHILD-RECENT (University of Modena) and the Catholic University Milan for useful suggestions and comments. We also thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions. We are also grateful to Piero Cipollone (Bank of Italy) and Patrizia Falzetti (INVALSI) for providing the data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European University Institute, Badia Fiesolana, Via dei Roccettini 9, 50014, San Domenico di Fiesole, FI, Italy

    Ylenia Brilli

  2. Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Turin, Campus Luigi Einaudi, Lungo Dora Siena 100, Turin, Italy

    Daniela Del Boca & Chiara D. Pronzato

  3. CHILD, Collegio Carlo Alberto, Via Real Collegio 30, 10024, Moncalieri, TO, Italy

    Ylenia Brilli, Daniela Del Boca & Chiara D. Pronzato

  4. IZA, Bonn, Germany

    Daniela Del Boca & Chiara D. Pronzato

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  1. Ylenia Brilli
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  2. Daniela Del Boca
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Correspondence to Daniela Del Boca.

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Brilli, Y., Del Boca, D. & Pronzato, C.D. Does child care availability play a role in maternal employment and children’s development? Evidence from Italy. Rev Econ Household 14, 27–51 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-013-9227-4

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