The proposed research will examine the relationships among women's employment, the number and spacing of their children and the means that they use to provide care for children. First, we will use data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women, Mature Women, and Youth (NLS) and the June Current Population Survey from 1977 and 1982 to analyze each of the two-way relationships between child care, number of children and their timing, and women's employment. In particular, we will focus on what kinds of women provide care for their children themselves, and what factors determine the use of formal versus informal, paid versus unpaid child care. Using information from the NLS and CPS we will estimate women's child care costs, by age of child and type of care, for women with various characteristics. These predicted costs are of interest in their own right and also serve as determinants of women's labor force behavior and fertility in the causal analyses. Our analyses of the two-way linkages in our model comprises two parts: (1) a tabular analysis of child care, fertility and employment; and, (2) a multivariate analysis. These analyses will present a comprehensive picture of the associations between the components of our model, providing general information for scholars and policy makers on the processes at work as well as providing the basis for our later causal analyses of these relationships. We will build and estimate causal models linking these decisions. In our causal modeling we test hypotheses relating to a variety of issues: Young women's expected labor force participation and fertility. Effects of child care on market and fertility. How differing availability of child care for different racial, ethnic and age groups affects their labor supply after childbirth. Effects of child care type on the stability of market work. How parents spend time with their children.
| Johansen, A S; Leibowitz, A; Waite, L J (1988) Child care and children's illness. Am J Public Health 78:1175-7 |
