Who Looks after the Kids? The Effects of Childcare Choice on Early Childhood Development in China*

Abstract

This paper examines whether childcare choice affects the early childhood development of children aged 7–59 months. Using the data from Chinese Family Panel Studies, we look at household choices between parental and grandparental cares and the timing of four key early life achievements – walking, talking, counting and toilet training. We conceptualize early childhood development within a household production model, which enables us to identify the impacts of childcare. Our results suggest that compared with parental care, grandparental care delays the achievement of all four outcome measures. Grandparental care is particularly disadvantageous for children who are ‘left‐behind’ by migrant parents.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/obes.12410
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School > Economics, Finance & Entrepreneurship
College of Business and Social Sciences > Aston Business School
Additional Information: © 2020 The Authors. Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics published by Oxford University and John Wiley & Sons Ltd This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Uncontrolled Keywords: Statistics and Probability,Social Sciences (miscellaneous),Economics and Econometrics,Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
Publication ISSN: 1468-0084
Last Modified: 19 Mar 2024 08:24
Date Deposited: 24 Feb 2021 13:45
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: https://onlinel ... 1111/obes.12410 (Publisher URL)
http://www.scop ... tnerID=8YFLogxK (Scopus URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2021-06
Published Online Date: 2021-02-11
Accepted Date: 2021-02-01
Authors: Zhang, Jing
Appleton, Simon
Song, Lina
Liu, Bing (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-0339-563X)

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