Care Labor and Family Income Inequality: How Childcare Costs Exacerbate Inequality among U.S. Families
中文摘要
照护基础设施对于支持家庭和促进女性参与劳动力市场至关重要，但其同样对家庭收入不平等具有影响。本文以美国儿童保育服务的可及性为案例进行研究。我们提出，市场化定价的儿童保育体系会在生育如何影响母亲对家庭收入的贡献方面产生不平等，因为相较于高收入女性，该类体系对低收入女性生育后的劳动供给约束更强，并由此加剧家庭收入不平等。我们使用收入与项目参与调查（SIPP）并与州级儿童保育价格相匹配，构建个体固定效应回归模型，估计生育对家庭收入及其近端决定因素——母亲的劳动供给与收入，以及伴侣的劳动供给与收入——的影响。我们发现，儿童保育价格会加大未拥有大学学位的母亲在生育后的收入损失，但对拥有大学学位的母亲则不然；且这些损失既未被伴侣收入的增加所补偿，也未被收入转移所补偿。因此，儿童保育成本使有伴侣且拥有大学学位与未拥有大学学位的女性之间的家庭收入差距扩大了34个百分点。
Abstract
Care infrastructures are essential for supporting families and enabling women’s participation in the labor market, but they also have implications for family income inequality. This article examines access to childcare services in the United States as a case study. We propose that market-priced childcare systems generate inequalities in how births affect mothers’ contributions to family income, because they constrain post-birth labor supply for lower-income women more than for higher-income women, and aggravate family income inequality as a result. Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) merged with state-level childcare prices, we estimate individual fixed-effects regression models for the consequences of births on family income and its proximate determinants: mothers’ labor supply and earnings, and partners’ labor supply and earnings. We find that childcare prices increase post-birth earnings losses for mothers without college degrees, but not for mothers with college degrees, and these losses are not compensated for by increases in partners’ earnings or by income transfers. As a result, childcare costs exacerbate family income gaps between partnered women with and without a college degree by 34 percentage points.