<mark>Third, a variety of cultural and historical factors may affect women’s response to childcare services. Klasen (2019) notes that despite global expansion of women’s education and rapid fertility declines, the trends in FLFP rates have been heterogeneous across developing countries. Klasen (2019) attributes this heterogeneity at least in part to d</mark> eep drivers of cultural differences. It is important to note, though, that cultural norms can change with institutional support, as illustrated, for example, in a study of Arab communities in Israel (Schlosser 2011). Similar to the populations of neighboring Arab nations, Israeli Arab women had a very low LFP rate. Once these communities had childcare centers, though, maternal LFP increased by 8 percentage points, an increase of almost 50 percent from the baseline rate of 17 percent.

<mark>Thus, we may expect the maternal labor market response to the availability of childcare in lowand middle- income countries to differ from the well-established positive relationship found in high-income countries.</mark> While country-level studies of impacts of childcare on maternal labor market outcomes abound, there have been few attempts to systematize this evidence from lower- and middle-income countries. Initial review of the evidence by Todd (2013) confirms the general finding that increasing availability and lowering the price of childcare increases maternal labor force participation (MLFP) in developing and transitioning economies. However, her review is part of a larger work on family-friendly policies and it is limited to the then scarce evidence on the topic of childcare, with only 3 studies having a causal inference research design. Burgeoning studies on childcare and maternal employment with more-plausibly-causal designs have been implemented since her 2013 research.

We have more overlap with the meta-analysis done by Harper, Austin, and Nandi (2017) —9 of the 13 studies they include—who provide an estimate of aggregated effect sizes of childcare and MLFP in lower- and middle-income countries. Limiting their meta-analysis to the 9 quasiexperimental or randomized studies, they calculate that a 30 percent increase in daycare utilization increases maternal employment by 6 percentage points, indicating responsiveness of women’s labor supply to childcare availability.

Evans, Jakiela, and Knauer (2021) review to what extent evaluations of early childhood development (ECD) interventions analyze impacts on mothers and conclude that only 4% of 478 studies they reviewed analyzed maternal labor market outcomes. As they focus on ECD, only 5 studies from our review are included in their work: we also include childcare interventions without an explicit ECD objective.

Our work extends earlier reviews in several respects. First, we include a larger number of studies (22) but limit them to the ones which plausibly identify causal impacts, excluding correlational studies. Second, in addition to standard institutional care in which paid workers use a facility specifically for childcare, our review includes primary school and after-school care, childcare provision at the location of employment, community centers, and community mothers’ homes. Third, while the theme of increased MLFP does unite the literature in all the papers included in this review, we also discuss hours worked, income, and type of work, though these outcomes are examined less consistently throughout the literature. Our strongest contribution is a discussion of conditions and specifics of childcare implementation that may affect the magnitude of the impacts. Thus, this review may provide additional insights to policy makers concerned with the specifics of the design of institutional childcare programs.

3