We develop and estimate a model of supply and demand for childcare. On the demand side, households make consumption, labor supply, and childcare decisions. On the supply side, centers make entry, price, and quality decisions. In addition, both paid and informal caregivers are available. Child development is a function of the time spent with parents and nonparental care providers. We estimate the model using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort, and perform policy experiments. Vouchers that can be used only in high-quality centers or by working mothers are particularly effective, since they deliver child development gains while increasing mothers’ labor supply.

Despite decades of research on heuristics and biases, evidence on the effect of large incentives on cognitive biases is scant. We test the effect of incentives on four widely documented biases: base-rate neglect, anchoring, failure of contingent thinking, and intuitive reasoning. In laboratory experiments with 1,236 college students in Nairobi, we implement three incentive levels: no incentives, standard lab payments, and very high incentives. We find that very high stakes increase response times by 40% but improve performance only very mildly or not at all. In none of the tasks do very high stakes come close to debiasing participants.