Istat working papers 2/2024

Giulia Milan, Viviana Celli, Emmanuele Pavolini, Stefani Scherer, Pietro Bracaglia, Pierina De Salvo, Valeria Qualiano, Roberta Crialesi

Full text of the 2/2024 issue (in Italian)

This work investigates the effect of the increasing supply of early childhood education services on birth rates in Italy.

International studies provide mixed results on this effect. Using a counterfactual framework, we study the causal effect of variations in the supply of early childhood education services on births at the municipal level.

The analyses show that a substantial increase in the availability of these services has a positive and statistically significant effect on birth rates, confirming the hypothesis that the increasing supply of early childhood services helps to slow down the birth decline, by removing one of the constraints to the realisation of couples’ reproductive plans