Workshop on Human Potential (Elise Chor, Harris School)

Abstract: In 2007, the Australian state of Queensland eliminated its public provision of preschool for four-year-olds. This decision arose from the desire to fund, instead, a kindergarten, or “Preparatory,” year of schooling for five-year-olds, in alignment with the other Australian states. This paper assesses how the policy change affected the child care market in Queensland through families’ child care decisions. I ask how the loss of a year of publicly provided education at age four affects the overall level of participation in early education and care; the types of care used by families (formal vs. informal); the intensity of child care use in terms of the likelihood that a child experiences multiple child care arrangements, the number of arrangements used, and the amount of time spent in non-parental care; and families’ child care expenditures. I find that the loss of public preschool availability at age four was associated with a seven percent point decrease in a child’s likelihood of experiencing any non-parental care and a ten percent decrease in the likelihood of attending formal child care, corresponding to effect sizes of .45 and .59 standard deviations respectively. Non-experimental estimates indicate that, among children who were in non-parental care, the policy change was associated with an increased likelihood of experiencing informal child care, providing evidence that public preschool crowds out informal care. The policy change was also associated with a decline in the probability of using multiple care arrangements, the number of child care arrangements used, and the amount of time spent in non-parental care. Furthermore, parents were more likely to pay for formal care and to do so using the tax system’s Child Care Benefit as a consequence of the policy change.

Bio: Elise Chor is a fourth-year doctoral student at the Harris School and a CHPPP Pre-Dissertation Fellow. Her research interests center on the economics of early childhood education and care and include the market for early education and care; the effects of state preschool programs on preschool access and participation; the effects of public preschool programs on child and family well-being; and the relationship between families’ child care decisions and maternal employment patterns.