@article{Ali_U-2021_193471,
title = {The impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. child care market: Evidence from stay-at-home orders},
author = {Ali, U. and Herbst, C. and Makridis, C.},
month = {feb},
year = {2021},
abstract = {Stay-at-home orders (SAHOs) were implemented in most U.S. states to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. This paper quantifies the impact of these containment policies on a measure of the supply of child care. The supply of such services may be particularly vulnerable to a SAHO-type policy shock, given that many providers are liquidity-constrained. Using plausibly exogenous variation from the staggered adoption of SAHOs across states, we find that online job postings for early care and education teachers declined by 16% after enactment. This effect is driven exclusively by private-sector services. Indeed, hiring by public programs like Head Start and pre-kindergarten has not been influenced by SAHOs. We also find that ECE job postings increased dramatically after SAHOs were lifted, although the number of such postings remains 4% lower than that during the pre-pandemic period. There is little evidence that child care search behavior among households was altered by SAHOs. Because forced supply-side changes appear to be at play, our results suggest that households may not be well-equipped to insure against the rapid transition to the production of child care. We discuss the implications of these results for child development and parental employment decisions.},
volume = {82},
journal = {Economics of Education Review},
publisher = {Elsevier},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2021.102094},
}
