Research on the Impact of Child Care Costs on Women's Labor Participation in Decision-making
Since the beginning of market-oriented reform in our country,the female labor participation rate has shown a continuous downward trend and has been lower than the male labor participation rate for a long time.Due to the influ-ence of traditional family division of labor,women bear the main responsibility of raising children in the family.There-fore,the cost burden related to child care usually has a certain negative impact on the labor supply for women.After the reform of the childcare system in our country,the collapse of the public childcare system has raised the price of child-care services.At present,the continuous decline in female labor participation rate in China is closely related to the in-creasing cost of child care.Based on this observation,using the data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey(CHNS)1991-2015 survey,we innovatively utilized the indicator of childcare expenses in community childcare insti-tutions for children aged 0～6,and empirically analyzed the impact of child care expenses on women's labor participa-tion decision-making in China using the Probit model and instrumental variable method.The research findings show that the increase in child care costs significantly reduces women's labor participation rate.Heterogeneity analysis shows that the increase in child care costs has a more significant negative impact on female labor participation rates in urban areas,households with lower levels of education,those under 30 years old,and middle to low-income families.Robustness analysis shows that the increase in child care costs does not have a significant negative impact on male la-bor participation rates;After controlling for endogeneity,the negative impact of child care costs on female labor partici-pation rate significantly increases.Against the backdrop of the complete relaxation of the birth policy,improving the in-clusive childcare service system,improving the female employment security system,and advocating for men to jointly assume childcare responsibilities are important measures to increase China's female labor participation rate.
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
