Intervention(s)
This project starts by investigating parents’ beliefs about the returns of early child care enrollment, both for their child's development and parents themselves, including labor market outcomes, gender equality in paid and unpaid work, and life satisfaction. We place a particular focus on belief differences between higher- and lower-SES parents. In a second step, we examine the causal effect of access to early child care on the beliefs of lower-SES parents about the early child care returns and their preferences about child care policies.
To identify the causal effects of early child care experiences, we exploit exogenous variation in child care access generated by a randomized controlled trial conducted by Hermes et al. (2025). Their intervention was designed to lower barriers in the application process for early child care slots without influencing preferences around child care attendance and indeed strongly increased the likelihood that lower-SES parents secure a child care place for their child. Treated families received information about the child care application process and, where desired, personalized support with the application (for details on the intervention and the effects, see Hermes et al. (2025) and Hermes et al. (2024)). In this current project, we measure effects of this intervention on beliefs about early child care returns and preferences about child care policies.
This project's empirical basis is a new survey that will be conducted in summer 2026. Building on the baseline sample of 607 families from Hermes et al. (2025), we will re-contact the original participants, with approximately 450 families expected to take part in this follow-up study. By the time of this survey, the children from the original study are around eight years old. The survey will capture (i) beliefs about the returns to early child care, both for the child's development and for parents' own life outcomes, (ii) intentions regarding child care enrollment, (iii) preferences over child care policies, and (iv) beliefs about societal returns to early child care. As in previous survey waves, our aim is once again to interview the mothers.
One of our primary outcomes is parents' beliefs about how early child care attendance affects a range of outcomes for both children and parents. Since most parents in our study no longer have a child of early-child-care age, we ask them to consider a hypothetical two-year-old child. We then present two scenarios: in one, the hypothetical child attends a child care center eight hours a day, five days a week; in the other, the parents care for the hypothetical child mostly on their own. For each scenario, parents report the likelihood that the parents work full-time, that paid and unpaid work is divided equally between them, and that the child develops well and that the parents are satisfied with their lives.
References
Hermes, H., P. Lergetporer, F. Peter, and S. Wiederhold (2025). Application Barriers and the Socioeconomic Gap in Child Care Enrollment. Journal of the European Economic Association 23 (3), 1133–1172.
Hermes, H., M. Krauß, P. Lergetporer, F. Peter, and S. Wiederhold (2024). Early Child Care, Maternal Labor Supply, and Gender Equality: A Randomized Controlled Trial. CESifo Working Paper No. 10178, Center for Economic Studies.