Despite the well-documented benefits of high-quality child care, many preschool-age children in the U.S. attend low-quality programs. Accordingly, improving the quality of child care is increasingly an explicit goal of government policy. However, accomplishing this goal requires a thorough understanding of the factors that influence parents’ child care decisions. This paper provides the first evidence on the demand for child care characteristics in the market for home-based care. Using a randomized audit design, we study three dimensions of caregiving: affordability (i.e., the hourly price of child care), quality (i.e., caregiver education and experience), and convenience (i.e., caregiver car ownership and availability). We find that while parents are extremely sensitive to the cost of child care, they also have strong preferences for quality, particularly caregivers’ educational attainment. Furthermore, we obtain mixed results on the convenience dimensions of child care, with parents valuing those owning a car but not those with more availability. Finally, we find significant heterogeneity in child care preferences according to families’ age of youngest child, race and ethnicity, and willingness-to-pay. Our findings are consistent with the notion that the problem of low-quality in the U.S. child care market may be explained by lack of affordability or the informational resources to identify high-quality care, rather than an undervaluation of such care by parents.

尽管高质量的托儿服务有许多有据可查的好处，但美国许多学龄前儿童仍参加低质量的计划。因此，提高托儿服务的质量越来越成为政府政策的明确目标。但是，要实现这一目标，需要对影响父母的育儿决策的因素有透彻的了解。本文提供了有关家庭护理市场中对儿童保育特征的需求的第一个证据。使用随机审计设计，我们研究了看护的三个方面：负担能力（即，儿童保育的每小时价格），质量（即，看护者的教育和经验）和便利性（即看护者的汽车拥有量和可用性）。我们发现，尽管父母对托儿费用非常敏感，但他们也对质量有强烈的偏好，特别是看护者的教育程度。此外，在育儿便利性方面，我们得到了不同的结果，父母对拥有汽车的父母进行了评估，而对那些拥有更多汽车的父母则没有评估。最后，根据家庭最小子女年龄，种族和种族以及支付意愿，我们发现育儿偏好存在显着异质性。我们的发现与以下观点相吻合：美国幼儿市场的低质量问题可能是由于缺乏负担能力或缺乏确定高质量护理的信息资源而引起的，而不是父母对此类护理的低估。我们发现，根据家庭最小子女的年龄，种族和种族以及支付意愿，育儿偏好存在显着差异。我们的发现与以下观点相吻合：美国幼儿市场的低质量问题可能是由于缺乏负担能力或缺乏确定高质量护理的信息资源而引起的，而不是父母对此类护理的低估。我们发现，根据家庭最小子女的年龄，种族和种族以及支付意愿，育儿偏好存在显着差异。我们的发现与以下观点相吻合：美国幼儿市场的低质量问题可能是由于缺乏负担能力或缺乏确定高质量护理的信息资源而引起的，而不是父母对此类护理的低估。