Search Results

Title: Effects of Child-Care Programs on Women's Effort
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Heckman, James J.
Effects of Child-Care Programs on Women's Effort
Journal of Political Economy 82,2,Part 2 (March-April 1974): S136-S163.
Also: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1829997
Cohort(s): Mature Women
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Keyword(s): Behavior; Child Care; Household Income; Leisure; Life Cycle Research; Welfare; Wives

The economics of tied work payments and methods for estimating the effect of such payments on labor supply are discussed. It is important to distinguish the conceptually easier problem of modeling the response to tied offers from the more demanding problem of providing reliable estimates of the appropriate behavioral functions. It has been shown that knowledge of consumer preferences is necessary to estimate program effects, and methods have been suggested for determining these preferences. By directly estimating indifference curves, hours of work and work- participation equations have been derived from a common set of parameters. The separation of preferences from constraints allows us to estimate the labor-supply parameters of individuals from data generated by nonstandard constraints, such as the broken-line budget constraints resulting from the tax system, where a tractable labor- supply function does not exist. At the cost of estimating a savings function, we can embed the traditional one- period model of labor supply into a life-cycle model. Both the distribution of tastes for work and distribution of market wage rates for the population at large are estimated. The estimates suggest that wage rates are strongly correlated with preferences for work so that simple "reduced-form" labor-supply functions obtained by regressing hours worked on wage rates give biased estimates. In forming estimates, a statistical procedure is employed which avoids both this bias and censoring bias.
Bibliography Citation
Heckman, James J. "Effects of Child-Care Programs on Women's Effort." Journal of Political Economy 82,2,Part 2 (March-April 1974): S136-S163.