Employment, child care spending, and child tax benefits

Excerpted from abstract:

As governments strive to help families with the challenges of working and raising children, understanding the effects of child tax benefits is increasingly relevant. This paper estimates the effects of child benefits on labor earnings and child care spending in Canada by using a novel data set that links 215,598 respondents of two national surveys to tax records and analyzing a 2015 reform that expanded child benefits for families with children aged 0–17. On average, the reform had no effect on earnings. In addition, results suggest that each $1.00 of benefits increases child care spending by $0.25 among married women.