Understanding Geographic Differences in Child Care Multipliers: Unpacking IMPLAN's Modeling Methodology (original) (raw)

Subsidized Child Care in Massachusetts: Exploring Geography, Access, and Equity

2018

Affordable child care is a crucial support for working parents, and the early educational experiences thatoccur in child care and preschool settings are equally crucial for children's development. In 2014, theChild Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG), which funds the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF)1--the largest federal source of funding assistance for low-income working parents to secure affordable,quality child care--was reauthorized. With reauthorization came new provisions requiring states to worktowards more equal access to care and increased supply of high quality, affordable care. Motivated bythese provisions, policymakers and researchers are paying increasing attention to issues related to childcare access and supply, and are in pressing need of research, conceptual frameworks, measurementstrategies, data sources, and technologies to better understand, measure, monitor, and address issues ofincreased and equal access to quality, affordable car

How Small are Small Markets? Location Choice and Geographical Market Size for Child Care Services

2018

In this article we propose an innovative way of delineating geographical markets based on easily accessible data. We apply this concept for the day care industry and investigate providers’ location choices relative to local market characteristics to evaluate the widespread presumption that local markets for child care services are geographically very small. Using a panel of all day care centers for the metropolitan region of Vienna, Austria, for nearly a decade, as well as geographically extremely disaggregated data on the spatial distribution of children under the age of six at the 250m × 250m grid cell level, we find that the location of children and day care centers are strongly related, but this relationship diminishes as soon as the distance between a child’s place of residence and the day care center’s location increases. We conclude that geographical markets for day care services in metropolitan regions are indeed very small (about 500m or 550 yards).