There has been a large and well-documented increase in the number of young children in the United States who are cared for by adult other than their parents on a regular basis. The well-being of young children is therefore increasingly closely related to the characteristics of the child care arrangements in which children spend substantial amounts of time. The goals of this project are to study the effects of family and child characteristics and the attributes of child care arrangements on the well-being of children and those that affect convenience, reliability, and other features not directly associated with child well- being. These estimates will provide the information needed to assess the demand for quality in child care, and how the demand for quality in child care would be affected by changes in government child care policies. Similarly, the study will estimate the important parameters of the technology of producing the multiple outputs of child care services. The parameters provide the information needed to assess the cost of producing child care with different characteristics, and the supply of child care with alternative characteristics. The empirical analysis will use four national data sets and three site-specific data sets. Together, these provide a wealth of information on child outcomes, child care quality measures, the characteristics of child care arrangements, cost, fees, input prices, and child and family characteristics.
