Abstract
In this paper we analyse the impact of mothers’ employment status and formal child care attendance during early childhood on children’s school grades later in life, controlling for socio-demographic factors. We use the year 2008 of the Italian ISFOL-PLUS dataset. The dataset provides information on each respondent’s demographic characteristics, as well as a set of retrospective information on the individual’s school grades at the end of junior high school, high school, and university, along with (in the 2008 wave only) information about the respondent’s formal child care attendance and mother’s employment status when he or she was under age of three. We estimate the effects of maternal employment and child care attendance on the probability that the respondent would have high grades at the end of high school. Since maternal employment and child care attendance are likely to be endogenously determined, we use an instrumental variable approach. Our empirical results show that while having a mother who was working (during early childhood) had no significant effect on an individual’s high school grades, child care attendance had a positive and significant effect. These results have potential policy implications. As maternal employment does not seem to negatively affect the development process of children, while child care attendance appears to have a positive impact on academic achievement, policy makers should consider expanding the availability of child care and promoting women’s participation in the labour market.
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Notes
ISFOL—Istituto per lo Sviluppo della Formazione Professionale dei Lavoratori.
Children are asked to recognise and name pictures.
The questions included in the survey were as follows: “When you were under age three, did you regularly attend child care centres (public or private)?” “Did your mother work when you were under age three?” and “Was she working part-time or full-time?”.
Of the respondents, 12.6 % earned a very high grade (60/60 or 100/100), 16.3 % had a high grade (between 55 and 59/60 or between 90 and 99/100), 23.3 % earned a medium grade (48–54/60 or 80–89/100), 28.1 % had a medium–low grade (40–47/60 or 70–79/100), and 19.7 % of respondents received a very low grade (36–39/60 or 60–69/100).
As a sensitivity analysis, we also estimate the model for different thresholds.
The website www.cittadinanzattiva.com reports for various years the results of an analysis of the demand for and the supply of child care in Italy, which show that the waiting lists to access child care services have been and continue to be long in all of the regions.
In the northern region 28 % of respondents obtained a high grade, compared to 29.5 % in the central and southern regions.
Note that all of the individuals with a missing value in the child care attendance variable also have a missing value in the variable on the mother’s employment status when the individual was very young.
The same reasoning holds true for the variables Mother_worked.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Emiliano Mandrone (ISFOL) for having included the suggested questions in the ISFOL-PLUS dataset. We acknowledge the financial and technical support of the Collegio Carlo Alberto project “Parental and Public Investments and Child Outcomes”, Giovanni Agnelli Foundation and the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant Agreement no. 320116 for the research project “Families&Societies”. We thank Massimiliano Bratti, Lia Pacelli, Chiara Pronzato, Joris Ghysels, Gerlinde Verbist, and Francesco Figari, for their comments and suggestions in the CHILD-Workshop on “Child care and Child Outcomes” in Moncalieri (Turin) and Helmut Rainer and Olivier Thèvenon in the EC workshop “Early Childhood Education and Care” in Brussels.
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Del Boca, D., Pasqua, S. & Suardi, S. Child Care, Maternal Employment, and Children’s School Outcomes. An Analysis of Italian Data. Eur J Population 32, 211–229 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-015-9370-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10680-015-9370-0