Low-fee ($5/day/child) Regulated Childcare Policy and the Labor Supply of Mothers with Young Children: A Natural Experiment from Canada / La politique des services de garde à 5 $/jour et l'offre de travail des mères québécoises: résultats d'une expérience naturelle canadienne
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On September 1st, 1997, a new childcare policy was initiated by the provincial government of Quebec in Canada. Childcare services licensed by the Ministry of the Family (not-for-profit centre, family-based, and for-profit centre under the agreement) began offering daycare spaces at the reduced parental contribution of $5 per day per child for children of age 4. For each following year, the government reduced the age requirement and engaged in a plan to create new childcare facilities and pay for the cost of additional $5 per day daycare spaces. On September 2000, the low-fee policy applied to all children aged 0-59 months (not in kindergarten) and the number of subsidized places increased from 82,000 in 1997 to 163,000 by the end of year 2002, while the number of eligible children, zero to four years old, declined from 445,000 to 373,000 over the same period. Using annual data (1993 to 2002), drawn from Statistics Canada's Survey on Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID), this study attempts to estimate the effect of the policy on the labour supply behaviour of Quebec mothers with pre-school children, aged from 0 to 5 years old. The analysis examines the impact of the policy on the following outcomes: labour force participation, number of annual weeks and hours worked, annual earned income and whether the job was full-time or part-time for mothers who declared having a job during the reference year. A non-experimental evaluation framework based on multiple pre- and post-treatment periods is used to estimate the effect of the childcare regime. The econometric results support the hypothesis that the childcare policy, simultaneously with the transformation of public kindergarten from a part-time to a full-time basis, had a large and statistically significant impact on the labour supply of Quebec's mothers with pre-school children. The estimates also suggest, though less convincingly, that the size of the impact increased simultaneously with the positive growth in the number of low-fee spaces. Le 1er septembre 1997, le gouvernement du Quebec instaurait une nouvelle politique de subventions aux services de garde. Les milieux de garde reconnus par le ministere de la Famille et de l'Enfance ont commence a offrir des places a contribution reduite (5 $/jour) pour les enfants qui avaient atteint l'âge de 4 ans au 30 septembre. En outre, le gouvernement s'engageait a reduire progressivement (chaque annee) l'âge d'admissibilite a ces places et a augmenter leur nombre dans le reseau des services de garde subventionnes. Malgre l'ampleur des depenses publiques pour ce programme, il n'y a pas d'etude qui a porte sur la realisation des objectifs poursuivis par cette politique. Cette etude vise a combler en partie cette lacune en analysant les effets de la politique de garde sur l'offre de travail des meres quebecoises. Elle s'appuie sur les donnees annuelles recueillies de 1993 a 2002 par l'Enquete sur la dynamique du travail et des revenus (EDTR) de Statistique Canada. L'evaluation des effets de la politique de garde sur differents indicateurs du marche du travail (taux d'occupation d'un emploi, semaines et heures annuelles travaillees, revenu annuel de travail, participation a temps plein au marche du travail) adopte une approche « quasi experimentale », c'est-a-dire que les differences entre les meres quebecoises (groupe traitement) et les meres des autres provinces (groupe de controle) sont comparees avant et apres la mise en place du regime de subventions aux services de garde. Nos resultats sont conformes a l'hypothese selon laquelle le programme de soutien aux services de garde mis en place par le gouvernement du Quebec, en meme temps que la maternelle cinq ans gratuite et a temps plein, ont eu un impact important et statistiquement significatif sur l'offre de travail des meres ayant des enfants de 5 ans ou moins. Les resultats econometriques soutiennent aussi, quoique de facon moins convaincante, que l'ampleur de l'effet a augmente parallelement a l'augmentation du nombre de places a contribution reduite de 1998 a 2002. En effet, nous ne pouvons rejeter l'hypothese selon laquelle l'effet de la politique est le meme pour les annees 1999 a 2002. Cependant, la regularite de la progression de cet effet pour toutes les variables d'offre de travail laisse croire que l'augmentation du nombre de places a eu un role important a jouer dans l'augmentation de l'offre de travail.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".