Quebec's childcare universal low fees policy 10 years after

This paper use data from the seven available cycles of Statistics Canada‟s National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) and difference-in-differences methods to tease out the effects of the childcare program This paper answers the following questions on labour supply and use of daycare: what are the effects of the policy on hours in daycare by children‟s age, mothers‟ level of educat [...] Because the NLSCY provides a much larger sample than the Survey on Labour Income and Dynamic (SLID), we can estimate the impact of the policy by sub-groups (age of children, mother‟s education levels), an exercise rarely undertaken, and also observe whether the positive impacts of the policy on labour supply in the earlier studies (see section 3 below) are persisting in the province of Québec. [...] We find that even in the best of scenarios, the benefits from increased labour supply for the government of Québec of the childcare policy fall very short of the public costs. [...] Table 3 presents the breakdown of children benefiting from the low-fee childcare by age from year 2000 to 2008, and shows the number of children that have been exposed to those childcare services over the years.10 The first four columns of the Table 3 indicate a significant regression of entry age in child care and a large progression of the proportion of children having experienced childcare by a [...] The NLSCY has much larger samples of young children than the SLID, but only two labour supply variables measured identically over the cycles (number of weeks worked in the year preceding the survey and labour participation at the times of the survey).