The impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. child care market: Evidence from stay-at-home orders

Abstract

Stay-at-home orders (SAHOs) were implemented in most U.S. states to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. This paper quantifies the impact of these containment policies on a measure of the supply of child care. The supply of such services may be particularly vulnerable to a SAHO-type policy shock, given that many providers are liquidity-constrained. Using plausibly exogenous variation from the staggered adoption of SAHOs across states, we find that online job postings for early care and education teachers declined by 16% after enactment. This effect is driven exclusively by private-sector services. Indeed, hiring by public programs like Head Start and pre-kindergarten has not been influenced by SAHOs. We also find that ECE job postings increased dramatically after SAHOs were lifted, although the number of such postings remains 4% lower than that during the pre-pandemic period. There is little evidence that child care search behavior among households was altered by SAHOs. Because forced supply-side changes appear to be at play, our results suggest that households may not be well-equipped to insure against the rapid transition to the production of child care. We discuss the implications of these results for child development and parental employment decisions.

Keywords: COVID-19; Child care; Coronavirus; Early care and education; Stay-at-Home Orders.

Fig. 1.

Time series variation in normalized early care and education and overall job postings, January 2020 to June 2020 Notes.—Source: Emsi. The figure plots the normalized monthly number of online job postings in early care and education (ECE) occupations (SOC 25–2011, 25–2012, 25–2021, 25–2052), as well as total number of job postings, between January 2020 and June 2020 (normalized to the average form June to December 2019).

Fig. 2.

Time series variation in early care and education job postings and child care internet search intensity, January 1 to June 30, 2020 Notes.—Source: Google Trends and Emsi. The figure plots a lowess smoothed series (across days) of the national number of job postings in early care and education (ECE) and the Google Trends search intensity score for the topic of “child care” on each day between January 1 and June 30, 2020.

Fig. 3.

Time series variation in the adoption of stay-at-home orders Notes.—Source: Dave et al. (2020), Mervosh et al. (2020), National Governors Association, and Raifman et al. (2020). The figure plots the fraction of states that implemented a SAHO on each day between January 1 and June 30, 2020.

Fig. 4.

Event study estimates for the supply of ECE Notes.—Source: Emsi. The figure investigates the presence of pre-trends by regressing the logged number of job postings associated with overall early childhood education (ECE), child care, Head Start, and pre-kindergarten teachers on 10 daily lagged and 20 daily lead variables, conditional on state and day-of-the-year fixed effects and the other state policy controls. Standard errors are clustered at the state- and month-level. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Fig. 5.

Minimum education required in the ECE job postings, percent of the total Notes.—Source: Emsi. The figure shows the time series in the share of ECE job postings (by day) that do not indicate a required minimum level of education and those requiring a minimum of a high school diploma, an AA degree, or a BA+ degree. The time series for this analysis runs from January 1 to June 30, 2020. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

Fig. 6.

Full-time work in the ECE job postings, percent of the total Notes.—Source: Emsi. The figure shows the time series in the share of ECE job postings (by day) requesting full-time work hours. The time series for this analysis runs from January 1 to June 30, 2020.

Fig. A1.

Comparison of employment and job postings data Notes.—Source: Current Population Survey and Emsi. The figure plots the logged number of employed workers in the Current Population Survey and the logged number of job postings from Emsi between January and June 2020.

Fig. A2.

Time series variation in early care and education job postings and child care internet search intensity, January 1 to June 30, 2020 Notes.—Source: Google Trends and Emsi. The figure plots the number of job postings in early care and education (ECE) and the Google Trends search intensity for the topic of “child care” on each day between January 1 and June 30, 2020.