access to childcare spend just as much time on unpaid work as those who do not have access to childcare, suggesting a significant double burden on this group. Having access to childcare is positively associated with women’s labor market outcomes and time spent on paid market work, suggesting that making childcare services more widely available could partly offset the adverse labor market impacts of motherhood, with potential implications for their social and economic well-being and empowerment.

The paper builds on the empirical literature on the relationship between childcare and women’s economic outcomes. Previous literature has focused predominantly on high- and middle-income countries and wage labor settings (Bick 2016, Givord and Marbot 2015, McCoy et al. 2017). Few studies consider low-income countries, vulnerable population groups, and other types of market work and unpaid work. Similarly, even though the link between women’s unpaid work and market work has been documented in some contexts (App and Rees 2005, Antonopoulos 2009, Charmes 2015, Samuels et al. 2018), the relative scarcity of time-use surveys in developing countries constrains the growth of this strand of literature. In South Asian countries, specifically, the literature has focused on identifying the determinants of low and declining FLFP in Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka, considering marriage, childbirth, and access to childcare among the possible drivers of these trends (Das 2006, Rani and Unni 2009, Bhalla and Kaur 2011, Gunatilaka 2013, Kapsos et al. 2014, Sorsa et al. 2015, Chatterjee et al. 2015, Solotaroff et al. 2019). The few studies that examine women’s labor market disadvantages in relation to childcare support, however, measure access to childcare indirectly, using household composition and other proxy variables (Madurawala 2009, Das and Žumbytė 2017, Solotaroff et al. 2020). Finally, studies that causally attribute the effect of childcare on women’s employment outcomes remain scarce, with a notable exception of an impact evaluation of a public child support program in India (Jain 2016).<sup>3</sup> This paper makes three contributions to the literature. First, labor force surveys typically omit questions on availability of childcare and, as a result, many previous studies use household beneficiary status in child development programs, access to child subsidies, or the presence of grandparents in the household to deduce whether or not families have access to childcare (see, for example, Maurer-Fazio et al. 2011, Posadas and Vidal-Fernandez 2013, Bick 2016, García-Morán and Kuehn 2017).<sup>4</sup> This paper uses a direct measure of childcare support, using women’s own responses to a survey question “who would take care of their young children when women go to work?” This makes the findings less dependent on

> 3 Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), India’s largest child development program, provides preschooling as well as other services, including supplementary feeding, immunization, and health checkups.

> 4 Measuring childcare availability through child development programs may lead to biases because some parents, such as those from lower income groups, may not have access to such programs. Similarly, using presence of elders in the family as a proxy may be problematic, since parents may have access to childcare regardless of the presence of grandparents, and the presence of grandparents by itself does not guarantee that they actively provide childcare, as they may need care support themselves.

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