The Expert Workshop on Childcare Policies is organised jointly by the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), University of Essex and the Centre for Policy (University of Antwerp)
to investigate how tools for international comparative research can be improved within the domain of evaluating the impact of child care policies.
The focus will be on the distribution and labour supply effects of these policies.
Other effects (such as e.g. child well-being) can also be discussed, provided they are linked to the central themes of labour supply and income. Particular attention will be paid to the data and methodologies used and/or needed to evaluate these policies.
The Workshop will aim to bring together both ex post types of evaluation, as well as ex ante studies, and papers are invited that have used an experimental design, descriptive papers analysing differential uptake in childcare policies, as well as labour economics papers estimating labour supply effects.
During the workshop, existing and potential tools for evaluating childcare policies will be presented and discussed, including microsimulation modelling and model families, and particular attention will be devoted to data collection endeavours.
The Workshop aims to bring scholars from different strands and methodological backgrounds together to discuss whether the research tools developed in InGRID may be of use for research agendas in this field, and/or whether the approach from other types of research may be integrated in the tools developed within InGRID. A central theme of the workshop is mutual learning and exchange of ideas, in particular with regard to the potential use of new tools in existing research on the impact of childcare policies.
Proposed themes
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Childcare and the impact on maternal employment: ex post analyses (e.g. using (quasi-) experiments).
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Childcare and the impact on maternal employment: ex ante analyses.
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Childcare policies and their distributive impact: first-order effects using microsimulation tools.
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Childcare policies and their distributive impact: incorporating second-order effects.
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Childcare policies and inequality in access and use.
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Data and methods: what data and infrastructural developments are needed to move forward academic research on childcare?
Register or submit an abstract via the InGRID website by 14 June 2015.
About the InGRID project
The InGRID project is funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration under Grant Agreement No 312691 and involves 17 European partners. Referring to the EU2020 – ambition of Inclusive Growth, the general objectives of InGRID – Inclusive Growth Research Infrastructure Diffusion – are to integrate and to innovate existing, but distributed European social sciences research infrastructures on ‘Poverty and Living Conditions’ and ‘Working Conditions and Vulnerability’ by providing transnational data access, organising mutual knowledge exchange activities and improving methods and tools for comparative research. This integration will provide the related European scientific community with new and better opportunities to fulfil its key role in the development of evidence-based European policies for Inclusive Growth