Family law scholars examine caregiving’s formal and informal systems. Literatures in both economics and law have relatedly tried to document who provides care for children and older and chosen family members, how, and on what terms, and the consequences those arrangements have on other family members’ (especially women’s) engagements outside the home. Tradeoffs emerge: how do we preserve access to care without sacrificing quality (broadly defined)?
In this spirit, Luis Faundez and Manisha Padi focus on childcare, carefully examining California’s daycare licensing regimes and how standards enforcement affects childcare facilities. Their study draws upon an increasingly popular method of data analysis in the law and economics field: exploiting the fact that officials enforce the same laws with significantly different standards and severity.
California’s licensing regime includes routine as well as non-routine inspections. For example, after a facility complaint is filed through the official portal, Licensing Program Analysts (“LPAs”) may interview staff and parents and review records in addition to conducting a non-routine inspection of the facility. As the authors estimate, moving from the most lenient LPAs1 to the most scrutinizing LPAs “increases the probability of being cited with a violation by more than 50 percentage points.” (P. 13.) And they find that LPA assignments are quasi- random. (P. 14.) As such, when a California childcare provider is subject to an inspection, an LPA’s stringency, or willingness to find a violation, reflects a proverbial roll of the die.
Faundez and Padi’s methodology and detailed data reflect the paper’s many strengths. Their data covers both genres of licensed childcare businesses: family daycare (in-home providers for up to fourteen children) and daycare centers (in commercial, nonprofit, or other spaces, permitted to care for a greater number of children). (Nationally, recent estimates suggest much greater usage of daycare centers than non-relative, family daycare, with the former being the most popular among the highest earning and educated brackets.) Faundez and Padi also distinguish between care-related violations, which are related to level of care, neglect, or abuse, and administrative violations, like recordkeeping, reporting, display of legal notices, and financial issues.2
By exploiting the random-like assignment of LPAs to inspections, and therefore findings of violations, the authors document the impact of enforcement on childcare centers. Specifically, the authors include a battery of results focused on three primary outcomes: change in used capacity (how many of the facility’s regulatorily permitted childcare spaces are actually being utilized); license revocation; and ultimate closure (whether voluntary or forced by license revocation).
I’ll focus on two findings that family law scholars, in particular, might find thought-provoking. First, closure is not solely driven by license revocation, and “family daycares seem to be most responsive to LPA stringency when administrative violations are detected.” (P. 19.) The administrative violation induces demand-side (enrollment) declines and eventual closures of family daycares, even when the license is not formally revoked. By distinguishing the effects of administrative violations from care-related violations, these authors illuminate how imposing additional operational costs can reduce profitability and lead to closure (independent of quality of care). Family daycares, which serve fewer children and operate in private residences, may be less professional than their commercial counterparts, leaving them less able to weather the fallout from an administrative violation. Remedying reputation harms or increasing staffing are expensive measures.
As the authors suggest, if the “largest costs come from complying with administrative requirements, rather than care-related violations,” families’ access to childcare can be limited for reasons I will charitably describe as procedural. Limiting the number of family daycares by stringently monitoring administrative compliance—whether recordkeeping or posting mandatory notices—should be a debated and conscious choice rather than an unintended consequence. Faundez and Padi’s findings leave me thinking that California, and perhaps other states, are falling into the second camp. The resources allocated towards administrative as opposed to care-related enforcement might instead be used to open, as opposed to close, childcare options.
Second, the authors are also able to infer the race and ethnicity of the childcare provider who meets with the LPA during inspection. The authors find that Hispanic providers have different experiences. As the authors estimate, again for administrative violations, “Hispanic providers seem much more likely to close and more likely to be assessed with a suspension or revocation” compared to non-Hispanic providers. (P. 21.) Race and ethnicity have long been lenses of scholarly inquiry in the child welfare or family regulation systems; Faundez and Padi use their rich data to bring these lenses to the childcare system as well and highlight the need to better understand LPAs’ interactions with and scrutiny of Hispanic childcare providers. The authors observe the language of the LPA’s visit (usually English) and generally rule out language barriers as an explanation for the Hispanic differential, which leaves non-linguistic cultural barriers. To that end, the Migration Policy Institute and others have suggested that the prevalence of family, friends, and neighbor (FFN) childcare in immigrant communities captures a desire for, and definition of quality, reflecting culturally-competent care as distinct from affordability. California’s differential impacts may then reveal the way its childcare licensing regime embraces an unduly narrow definition of quality that isn’t embraced by its stakeholders.
Faundez and Padi’s deep dive into the impact of state regulation and enforcement regimes on childcare facilities goes far beyond just ethnicity and facility type. Consonant with other scholars of family law, their paper interrogates whether our efforts to regulate caregiving are in fact best serving the children and families cared for. While the authors are careful to highlight their descriptive analysis rather than normative implications, they raise an important question about the childcare access-quality tradeoff. Do we actually protect and support families through California’s current licensing enforcement regime, especially as applied to financially liminal family daycares? Future scholarship can hopefully pick up where the authors leave off, and consider both further data collection as well as more detailed reforms.
- To calculate LPA stringency, the authors first predict the probability of a violation based on regional office and other variables, and then calculate the difference (residual) between the actual violation outcome and the predicted probability of a violation. For a fuller explanation of the authors’ instrumental variables approach and construction of the “residualized, leave-out LPA stringency measure.” (Pp. 12-14.)
- The words abuse and neglect will ring bells for those familiar with the foster care system, and the California complaint system leveraged by the authors includes complaints against licensed resource family-foster homes, though these are not the subject of the authors’ study.
