Explaining the Matthew Effect in Child Care Services: Combining Micro and Macro Factors

The last few decades witnessed an increasing attention for the role formal child care provision can play in fostering reconciliation for working parents, fighting social exclusion and promoting human capital accumulation. In this respect child care provision seems one of the best tools to promote a social investment approach. It has become apparent, however, that access to and use of these services is socially stratified throughout developed economies. Part of the recent literature has shown that such Matthew Effect in childcare might even reinforce existing social class divides. As such, the Matthew Effect in childcare runs counter to the promises of the social investment strategy. Yet, this effect seems stronger in certain countries than others.

We contribute to the literature on social investment and the Matthew Effect in two ways. Firstly, we use the 2010 EU-LFS ad hoc module on work and family reconciliation which has a larger sample compared with most other datasets used so far to study the Matthew Effect in childcare. This allows us to, secondly, study more in detail the determinants of the Matthew Effect in child care services and help to explain cross-country differences in the relevance of these factors. In particular, we take into account 1) factors at the micro-individual level, including the role played by ethnic background of children, something that has been overlooked in previous research; 2) factors at the macro level, by looking at the role played by welfare state institutions and the functioning of the labour market.