Conference Agenda

The US provides child care subsidies only for low-income-working citizens rather than universal subsidized child care. Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) Subsidies are among the most crucial policy instrument to help eligible parents pay their expenses for non-parental child care by increasing mothers’ employment. In this paper, I aim to discuss the current policy and characteristics of subsidized families and then underline who the families subject to the CCDF system in a broader context are: eligible recipients, eligible non-recipients, and non-eligible but in-need families for each state. I will argue that employment-based subsidies with a long list of eligibility criteria might create a suboptimal level of provision, and they might not meet the need of low-income families. To do so, I will determine whether any racial or ethnic groups are overrepresented in any of those three groups. Then, I will explore whether it is because of particular barriers or loopholes in the application process or because some families are more likely to live in states with strict eligibility rules. I review every state’s policy requirements. I then use the data on subsidized children in center-based providers and the characteristics of subsidy recipients from the National Survey of Early Care and Education (NSECE, 2019), the Urban Institute CCDF Policy Database, and the American Community Survey (ACS). Using quantitative models, I will analyze how inclusive the current policy is in each state. To sum up, I will provide a discussion and quantitative findings on the conditional CCDF system for different households in each state.

Women’s unpaid care and its impact on labor market participation is of increasing importance in the global policy arena. In most communities, women are considered caregivers, and these persistent notions shape national labour markets. Globally, 21.7% of working age women perform unpaid care work on a full-time bases, compared to only 15% of men (ILO, 2019). Research has demonstrated in multiple contexts that unpaid work contributes to the stalled progress on gender gaps in employment, earnings, and work quality (Elson, 2017; Himmelweit 2002, OECD 2014, Razavi 2007). Gender gaps in unpaid work and gender gaps in paid work feed off one another (Ilkkaracan, Kim, Masterson, Memis, and Zacharias 2021).

This paper investigates this nexus between the unpaid care burden and the impact on labor force activity in Thailand. Women’s labor force participation, though relatively high for Southeast Asia, has been on the decline. This is partially explained by demographic aging, however there is a question about how the care burden impacts this trend. There is considerable regional difference in economic activity across Thailand and the distribution of paid and unpaid care work is stretched from the urban areas to the rural areas via skip generation practices. We take advantage of a merged data set that combines a time-use survey and labor force and informal worker survey with a focus on geographical stratification and employment status. We analyze the interaction between women’s care burden and employment outcomes, with particular focus on employment status, and how these patterns vary by women’s age and region. Our empirical approach combines descriptive and econometric analyses of cross sectional datasets.

Preliminary results confirm trends revealed in existing literature in other country contexts that affordable child and elder care services are key women’s access to decent work. This paper adds to the literature by considering these trends in the context of aging demographics in Thailand and regional diversity, as well as macroeconomic sectors and employment status. Women of all ages in Thailand are negatively affected by the care burden but middle age and elderly women, particularly those in the the Northeast and Southern regions of Thailand, are more likely to be in informal labor markets doing unpaid family work and own account labor.

Attention to rising income inequality in the U.S. since the late 1970s has been accompanied by the recognition that income yields an incomplete picture of inequality in living standards. Unpaid household production has been found to countervail income inequality. However, existing studies of household production and inequality have either looked at a snapshot in time (Frazis and Stewart 2011; Folbre et al. 2013) or have neglected to include childcare in household production (Gottschalk and Mayer 2002). The last five decades have a seen a substantial rise of women into paid employment and dual-earner households (Blau and Winkler 2018); the rise of single-parent families (Mclanahan and Percheski 2008); and sharply divergent trends in the amount and type of parental childcare provided across the income distribution (Flood et al. 2022). Using the American Heritage Time Use Study, a database of national time-diary samples, we examine how inequality in the joint distribution of family income and household production in the U.S. has changed over five decades, from 1965 till 2015. In the absence of complete data on time use on all family members, we predict total household time allocated to housework and childcare, also netting out day-to-day variation to obtain long-run measures of household production. We use time spent with children (available consistently across years) during non-care activities as a proxy for child supervision. Our (preliminary) results suggest that while household production partially equalizes inequality in money incomes, this equalizing role has declined over time.

The existence of negative effects of motherhood on the labor trajectories of mothers and the absence of effects for fathers are already stylized facts in both developed and developing countries. However, the understanding of labor market dynamics around childbirth relies in couples decisions. This paper investigates the effect of the first child on couples' labor trajectories. Applying an event study method to administrative data on birth certificates and formal labor trajectories, results document no effect on couples' total labor income but a change in its gender composition. Mothers reduce their labor force participation thus negatively affecting their share of couples' income. One year after the birth of the first child, the proportion of dual-earner couples reduced by 10% and this drop fails to recover five years after childbirth. Moreover, this paper provides robust evidence of a motherhood trap: child penalties are evident for all subgroups of women considered and persist after five years of childbirth. However, it penalties are lower the higher the woman's position within the couple. The drop in formal employment reaches 25% for mothers that contributed less than 20% of total income, and 10% for those that contributed with more than 80%. Moreover, the penalty decreases with the household income level. The birth of the first child reduces formal employment by 30% for women in the lowest income quintile, and by 10% for those in the highest income quintile. Overall, the evidence provided in this paper builds on the gender norms' hypothesis behind the persistent gender labor gaps.