VAM-Velferd, arbeid og migrasjon

Our project aims to inform the debate on effects of child care by shedding light on how child care affects the development of young children. Moreover, we want to explore whether early child care influence the behavior of parents. During the previous year we have been looking closer into how free child care affects child care use among children with an immigrant background, and how their parents labor market behavior is influenced by such a policy. We find that free childcare increase child care use among children with an immigrant background by approximately 15 percent. We find no such effect among children without immigrant background. Parents are to a little extent affected by access to free child care. Furthermore, we have looked into whether the statutory right to a child care slot for children born before September 1st implies that children born before the cut off start earlier in child care compared to children born after September 1st. The analysis is based on data from Oslo. We find little support that there is a discontinuity in child care start around the cutoff date. This does not imply that every child gets to start child care when their parents want. It is likely that children born during late autumn or early winter still has trouble finding child care when the parental leave expires. However, the main problem for these children is not that they do not have a statutory right to a slot, but that the period of parental leave expires at a time when there are few available child care slots. Our analysis suggests that the right to a child care slot did little to change this. We have also explored how toddlers are affected by enrollment in child care. We exploit a lottery that took place in the municipality of Oslo. This allows us to compare otherwise similar children, but where one child was admitted to child care earlier than the other due to winning the lottery. We find that toddlers that enroll early (due to winning the lottery) perform better at tests in first grade. Moreover, the project looks at how the characteristics of child care staff affect children's cognitive development. We use the previously mentioned lottery data from Oslo, which also caused many children to end up in another child care center than the one they applied for. Thus, we can compare children who have applied to the same child care institutions, but who ended up in child care centers with varying staff composition due to the lottery. In an article on universal child care and social mobility, we study the clustering of children in child care centers in Oslo. We are particularly interested in how the proportion of children with immigrant backgrounds varies across city districts and across child care centers within districts. Using administrative data covering every child in Oslo over the last decade, we document substantial segregation. The segregation results mainly from parents of similar socioeconomic backgrounds applying to the same centers. Though this can to some extent be explained by residential segregation, we show that reallocating children across centers only 500 meters from their homes would substantially reduce segregation. Lastly, we study the impact of child care for toddlers on the labor supply of mothers and fathers in Norway. Our estimates indicate that child care use causes an increase in the labor supply of mothers: cohabiting mothers move towards full time employment, largely driven by earlier return to work after child birth. For every 10 cohabiting mothers who use full time care, 3 more mothers will be employed than had they used no care at all. Meanwhile, we find no impact for fathers or grandparents. This may indicate that mothers are still the primary caretakers, staying home when child care is not available. This supports the notion that the counterfactual mode of care may be different for toddlers and preschoolers, which could be a key insight when considering how child care may affect child development. The project has organized one workshop during the project period, "Interventions during childhood and subsequent child development". A number of international participants, as well as a good spread of presenters from different academic institutions in Norway, participated in the workshop. Project web-page: https://sites.google.com/site/vamchildcareearlychildhood/

Today's rising generation in the OECD countries is the first in which a majority is spending a large part of their early childhood in institutionalized child care. Even for children below three years of age, close to 50 % are now enrolled in many countries. Evidence on how child care might affect the development of toddlers is largely missing, despite the recent increase in enrollment. Understanding how toddlers are affected by time spent in child care is hence of great importance, particularly in Norway where child care for the youngest has been rolled out at a high speed throughout the last ten years. Moreover, inequality in the educational attainment of native and immigrant groups has been of great concern to policymakers in the US and Europe for a long time. The low enrollment of children from immigrant families in preschool programs enhances the fear that the current educational inequality will persist into future generations. We aim to advance the understanding of how publicly provided preschool can improve the educational destinies of children from immigrant families. While child care plays an important role for child development, it is also affecting the family more in general. Access to subsidized child care may for instance improve parents' labor market opportunities. The quality of the child care institution might also play an important role for the amount of work parents want to supply in the labor market. Moreover, subsidized child care could possibly affect the decision to have a new child , as it lowers the cost of bringing up children. Our empirical analyses will focus on establishing causal inferences. We will take advantage of a natural experiment in Oslo during the years 2004-2007 where slots in child care centers were allocated in a lottery. In addition we will use various instrumental variable and difference-in-difference approaches taking advantage of individual level register data for the entire Norwegian population.