Seminar: An Up-to-Date Joint Labor Supply and Child Care Choice Model

Norwegian parents of preschool children make their care choices from a completely different choice set compared to what their predecessor did. Now, there is essentially only one type of nonparental care, center-based care, and at the parental side fathers take a more pivotal role in the early childhood care. In the present paper we develop and estimate a joint labor supply and child care choice model that accounts for these new characteristics, assuming that this model points to current and future modeling directions for several other economies too. Estimations suggest that the average wage elasticity for mothers is 0.25–0.30.