TY  - JOUR
A1  - Bauernschuster, Stefan
A1  - Borck, Rainald
T1  - Formal Child Care and Family Structure: Theory and Evidence
JF  - CESifo economic studies : a joint initiative of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and Ifo Institute for Economic Research
N2  - This article studies the effect of child care provision on family structure. We present a model of a marriage market with positive assortative matching, where in equilibrium, the poorest women stay single. Couples have to decide on the number of children and spousal specialization in home production of public goods and child care. We then study how child care provision affects the equilibrium. Due to specialization in home production, the incentive to use child care is smaller for married mothers than for single mothers. We show that this increases the number of single mothers and the divorce rate. Using survey data from Germany, we present suggestive empirical evidence consistent with this finding. (JEL codes: J12 and J13).
KW  - marriage
KW  - divorce
KW  - single parenthood
KW  - child care
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1093/cesifo/ifv025
SN  - 1610-241X
SN  - 1612-7501
VL  - 62
SP  - 699
EP  - 724
PB  - Oxford Univ. Press
CY  - Oxford
ER  -