Women’s Employment and Childcare Choices in Spain Through The Great Recession

ABSTRACT

The Great Recession (2008–13) changed patterns in women’s employment and the use of formal and informal external childcare among mothers of young children in Spain. This paper analyzes these changes using an analytical strategy that takes into account interdependencies across the outcomes under study. The results show that the economic crisis has resulted in interesting changes in the use of external childcare across mothers’ and fathers’ employment status; for example, as men’s unemployment increased, the use of informal non-parental childcare declined, which might be related to (unobserved) changes in fathers’ involvement in childcare during the recession. These results further indicate the need for policies that improve access to formal childcare, as well as policies that provide men and women with employment stability.

KEYWORDS:

• Women’s employment
• childcare
• economic cycle
• structural models
• tobit models
• Spain

JEL Codes:

• J13
• J16
• J22

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was supported by the Consejería de Educación, Cultura y Deportes of the Junta de Comunidades de Castilla – La Mancha (ref. POII-2014-014-A).

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at 10.1080/13545701.2019.1566754

Notes

1 According to a private survey, full-time (eight hours) average fees in private care centers were around 310 euros (including daily meals) per month in 2009 (Consumer Erosky 2009).

2 Royal Decree 27/2003, dated 1-10-2003; introduced as a reform to the Income Tax Law, still in force.

3 Law 35/2007, dated 11-15-2007. It was colloquially known as “cheque bebé.”

4 The 3-year-old children in the sample are only up to 42 months old. Otherwise, at the moment of the interview (between January and June), they would already be in preschool. As already mentioned, the preschool net enrollment rate is nearly universal in 3- to 5-year-old children, so the demand for formal care in that age range is not relevant in our study.

5 Non-Spanish-born mothers were excluded from the sample since their partnership and fertility decisions might have taken place in their countries of origin and, therefore, in a non-observable context.

6 Throughout the text, mothers’ partners are equivalent to fathers. We do not distinguish between fathers and stepfathers since we do not expect them to differ much in their involvement with child care. Moreover, the number of stepfathers in the sample is very small.

7 The receipt of family benefits is arguably endogenously related to a mother’s employment status. We keep them in our specification because they cover a large range of benefits, some of which are related not to being employed, but to the level of household income. They also include the universal birth grant in force between July 2007 and December 2010.

8 The sample sizes do not allow splitting the sample by marital status. This is unfortunate, as marital status may influence not only the levels of the dependent variables (incidence and number of hours) but also the elasticity of mothers’ behavior to other variables, such as household income and the receipt of child benefits.

9 NUTS1 are seven large areas which aggregate the seventeen regions/autonomous communities in Spain: Madrid, northeast (the Basque Country, Navarre, La Rioja, and Aragon), northwest (Galicia, Asturias, and Cantabria), center (Castilla y Leon, Castilla-La Mancha, and Extremadura), east (Catalonia, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands), south (Andalusia, Murcia, Ceuta, and Melilla), and the Canary Islands.

10 Because of the truncated nature of the dependent variables, the marginal effects in a tobit model are computed from the effects a linear model would provide times the estimated share of positive outcomes.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nuria Legazpe

Nuria Legazpe is temporary Associate Lecturer in Applied Economics at the Universidad de Castilla – La Mancha, Spain. She holds a PhD in Economics from the same university since 2012. Her expertise is focused on female labor market participation and fertility decisions in Spain, as well as youth labor markets and job satisfaction. Her work has been published in Journal of Family Issues; Journal of Economic and Family Issues; Work, Employment and Society, and Review of Economics of the Household, among others.

María A. Davia

María A. Davia holds a PhD in economics in Universidad de Alcalá (Spain) since 2003 and is currently Lecturer in Applied Economics in Universidad de Castilla – La Mancha (Spain). Her expertise covers youth labor markets and youth poverty, school-to-work transitions, non-monetary benefits of education, and, most recently, female participation and fertility decisions. She has taken part in national and international (European Commission-funded) research projects, and she has published her work in diverse refereed journals and international monographs.