Stay-at-home orders (SAHOs) were implemented in most U.S. states to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. This paper quantifies the impact of these containment policies on a measure of the supply of child care. The supply of such services may be particularly vulnerable to a SAHO-type policy shock, given that many providers are liquidity-constrained. Using plausibly exogenous variation from the staggered adoption of SAHOs across states, we find that online job postings for early care and education teachers declined by 16% after enactment. This effect is driven exclusively by private-sector services. Indeed, hiring by public programs like Head Start and pre-kindergarten has not been influenced by SAHOs. We also find that ECE job postings increased dramatically after SAHOs were lifted, although the number of such postings remains 4% lower than that during the pre-pandemic period. There is little evidence that child care search behavior among households was altered by SAHOs. Because forced supply-side changes appear to be at play, our results suggest that households may not be well-equipped to insure against the rapid transition to the production of child care. We discuss the implications of these results for child development and parental employment decisions.

美国大多数州都实施了居家令 (SAHO)，以减轻 COVID-19 的传播。本文量化了这些遏制政策对衡量儿童保育供应的影响。鉴于许多供应商的流动性受限，此类服务的供应可能特别容易受到 SAHO 型政策冲击的影响。使用各州交错采用 SAHO 的看似合理的外生变化，我们发现在颁布后，早期护理和教育教师的在线职位发布下降了 16%。这种影响完全是由私营部门服务驱动的。事实上，启蒙计划和学前班等公共项目的招聘并没有受到 SAHO 的影响。我们还发现，在取消 SAHO 后，ECE 职位发布急剧增加，尽管此类帖子的数量仍比大流行前时期低 4%。几乎没有证据表明 SAHO 改变了家庭中寻找托儿服务的行为。由于被迫的供应方变化似乎在起作用，我们的结果表明，家庭可能没有做好充分准备以防止迅速过渡到儿童保育生产。我们讨论了这些结果对儿童发展和父母就业决定的影响。