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Title: Child Care Choices and Children’s Cognitive Achievement: The Case of Single Mothers
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Bernal, Raquel
Keane, Michael P.
Child Care Choices and Children’s Cognitive Achievement: The Case of Single Mothers
Journal of Labor Economics 29,3 (July 2011): 459-512.
Also: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659343
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Keyword(s): Academic Development; Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC); Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Bias Decomposition; Child Care; Child Care Arrangements; Child Support; Maternal Employment; Modeling, Instrumental Variables; Parental Investments; Parents, Single; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT); Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF); Welfare

We evaluate the effect of child care versus maternal time inputs on child cognitive development using single mothers from the NLSY79. To deal with nonrandom selection of children into child care, we exploit the exogenous variation in welfare policy rules facing single mothers. In particular, the 1996 welfare reform and earlier state-level policy changes generated substantial increases in their work/child care use. We construct a comprehensive set of welfare policy variables and use them as instruments to estimate child cognitive ability production functions. In our baseline specification, we estimate that a year of child care reduces child test scores by 2.1%.
Bibliography Citation
Bernal, Raquel and Michael P. Keane. "Child Care Choices and Children’s Cognitive Achievement: The Case of Single Mothers." Journal of Labor Economics 29,3 (July 2011): 459-512.