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Working mothers’ decisions on childcare: the case of Spain

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Abstract

This paper aims to analyze household decisions regarding the childcare of young children. We present two specifications. The first one assumes a sequential decision process. Firstly, parents choose between paid or unpaid care and, secondly, those who opt for paid childcare must decide whether to take their children to a nursery or pre-school or employ somebody to care for them. The second specification is a multinomial Logit in which it is assumed that parents choose from three alternatives: unpaid care, paid care by a nanny, and center-based care. We apply our models to a sample of working mothers with children under three. The database used is the 2008–2010 Spanish Survey of Quality of Working Life (Encuesta de Calidad de Vida en el Trabajo). The results are in line with previous work: Parental education, family composition, income and the characteristics of the mother’s job are important factors in determining the type of childcare chosen for under-three-year-olds.

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Notes

  1. This information was taken from the following OECD link: http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/37/59/40192107.pdf.

  2. For more information, see http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/46/13/37864698.pdf.

  3. According to data obtained from a special module of the Spanish Labor Force Survey conducted in 2010, 87% of people did not reduce their working time to care for their youngest child (http://www.ine.es/daco/daco42/daco4211/anamodu10.pdf). On the other hand, the information published by the Spanish Ministry of Employment and Social Security shows that the number of parents who were on unpaid parental leave in 2011 is about 34,100 people which is a small figure (http://www.empleo.gob.es/estadisticas/ANUARIO2011/PMA/index.htm).

  4. See Borra (2010) for a descriptive analysis of the Spanish institutional setting.

  5. Becker (1981) and Cigno (1991) survey the main contributions to the analysis of Economics of the Family.

  6. Examples of papers following this quantity-quality theoretical approach are Becker and Lewis (1973), Blau and Hagy (1998) and Lundholm and Ohlsson (2002).

  7. Duncan and Giles (1996) and Blau and Currie (2006) discuss the empirical evidence on this subject.

  8. This article is published in the Journal of Human Resources, volume 27, issue 1, a special issue on childcare.

  9. Related to this literature, it is worth mentioning the recent article by Herrarte et al. (2012), which analyzes labour market withdrawal and maternity decisions of Spanish women, including among the explanatory variables childcare services.

  10. These variables are separately constructed for each year and then they are aggregated because data come from three different years so monetary variables are not comparable in real terms.

  11. Figures about pre-primary education enrollment come from the Ministry of Education and the population data come from the Municipal register. These figures are available on the website of the Spanish National Statistics Institute: http://www.ine.es/en/inebmenu/indice_en.htm#11.

  12. Other covariates, such as region, firm size, self-employment and percentage of immigrants in the region were not significant, thus they were excluded from the final estimates.

  13. In fact, preliminary estimates showed that these variables did not affect significantly the probability of choosing center-based care versus home-based care.

  14. Blau and Hagy (1998) and Tekin (2007) relax the IIA property of the multinomial specification imposing an error structure that allows correlation across the disturbance terms.

  15. In the case of Borra and Palma (2009), the income variable excludes women’s earnings.

  16. Hofferth and Wissoker (1992) find that mothers with a workday beginning after 3 p.m. are less likely to select a sitter or relative than other childcare modes.

  17. The AIC is a standard test for discriminating between nonnested maximum likelihood models (Cameron and Trivedi 2009). It is computed as:

    $$ {\text{AIC}} = - 2{\text{Log}}L + 2k $$

    where k is the number of parameters. According to this criterion, the model with the smallest AIC is the one preferred. The AIC value for the Probit specification is 1,520.775 whereas the AIC value for the multinomial Logit is 1,521.267.

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank two anonymous referees whose comments and suggestions have helped to improve the quality of this paper. This paper is part of the research project DER2010-21686-C02-01 of the Ministry of Science and Innovation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Economía, Facultad de Economía y Empresa, Universidad de Oviedo, Campus del Cristo, 33006, Oviedo, Spain

    María José Suárez

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  1. María José Suárez
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Correspondence to María José Suárez.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 5 and 6.

Table 5 Probit with sample selection
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Table 6 Multinomial logit
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Suárez, M.J. Working mothers’ decisions on childcare: the case of Spain. Rev Econ Household 11, 545–561 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-013-9189-6

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