Information Kid – Effects of Information Provision and Application Assistance on Childcare Participation and Life Outcomes

In the past two decades, early childcare has become an essential tool to support child development and to increase employment opportunities of parents in many European countries. However, children from disadvantaged families tend to start childcare at later age, although – according to well-identified economic studies – these children would benefit more from enrollment into childcare than their peers from more advan-taged backgrounds. Lack of information about both the availability of childcare facili-ties and financial support for taking up childcare as well as difficulties to navigate through the application process have been put forward as likely explanations for lower childcare usage among disadvantaged families. In this project, we conduct a random-ized controlled trial (RCT) in Germany to investigate how alleviating these barriers affects participation in early childcare (“Krippe”). To this end, we offer a randomly selected group of parents practical and legal childcare-related information as well as assistance in the application process for a childcare slot. We conduct the RCT in two cities with a high share of parents from disadvantaged backgrounds (i.e., parents with migration background or single parents). We also specifically target first-time parents. We aim at answering whether our treatment (1) affects parents’ application intentions and behavior, and (2) increases childcare enrollment. If our treatment increases child-care enrollment, we (3) also plan to investigate the effects of childcare participation on child development and parental labor-market participation. Given our conservative cost calculations, we envisage a sample size of 600 parents with children aged one to two years (at the start of the childcare year). In case the field work is less costly than planned, we will continue sampling up to 800 parents.