The Effect on Maternal Employment of State Investments and Practices to Subsidize Infant and Toddler Care

• In Event: Federal and State Investments in Early Childhood and Parent Outcomes

Abstract

On an annual basis, the federal Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), combined with state mandatory and discretionary funds, is the largest public funding stream devoted to early care and education (ECE). In addition to direct subsidies to qualifying families, a subset of CCDF funds is set aside to improve access to and the quality of care, including infant and toddler care and education (ITCE). State policies related to ITCE under CCDF take many forms, such as the use of grants or contracts with providers to directly increase ITCE supply, increases in provider reimbursement rates for ITCE to cover the higher cost of providing ITCE and thus indirectly increase the supply, and investments in the quality of ITCE available either through direct funding for program improvement or the use of tiered reimbursement tied to a provider’s quality rating. While there are some requirements on how these set-aside funds are spent, states have flexibility in the combination of investments made each year. In this paper, we first create a tractable taxonomy of the suite of investments made by states related to ITCE. Next, using both aggregate CCDF administrative data at the state level and micro data at the family level from the American Community Survey, we deploy a quasi-experimental design that leverages the changes in investments both across states and over time to isolate plausibly causal estimates of the impacts of different policies designed to increase access to ITCE. We consider each policy while accounting for the entire suite of policies, as well as explore if certain policies work better in combination. The additional use of micro data on families within states allows us to explore heterogeneity in the state level causal estimates, in particular by the age of the youngest child within a household and by household sociodemographic characteristics such as race and ethnicity. Our outcomes include measures of labor force participation of mothers of infants and toddlers.

Author

• Lynn A Karoly, RAND Corporation
  Presenting Author