 Thank you very much to Lacea for organizing this session. What I'm presenting here is a joint work with Cecilia Rossell and Federico Scalesse, and what we are doing is exploring the link between hours of work and early childhood education and care services in Latin America. Our motivation is basically these services, early childhood corresponds to children age three to five and childcare services for children, for smaller children up to three years old. These type of services has increased their coverage in developed and developed countries through a very important diversity of institutional forms and designs, and the same process took place in Latin America. We have literature there analyzing the expansion of these childcare and preschool services. Again with a lot of variation in the design, public provision services provided by the civil society organizations, but subsidized by the state, private services, etc. And a characteristic of these services in Latin America is the highly stratified rates of enrollment, so very big differences by income quintile levels of education, etc. We have at the world level evidence of the benefit for children's cognitive and social skills, positive effects, but also we know that the effects finally depend or have much to do with child socioeconomic context and with the quality of the services. So there are differences depending on these two key factors. We know that there are some positive effects for mother-level market outcomes, but again there is a lot of heterogeneity in these effects, in the results depending on the country, and up to what we know there are mainly no explorations about potential effects with unpaid work. Here we are not looking at effects, this is just a first look about associations. Another important motivation is that we know that gender gaps in times dedicated to housework are higher in Latin American countries that in the developed world, and also that having children imposes relatively high costs in terms of labor market trajectories for women in the region. We have now evidence about this for some countries in the region based on administrative data, and we can track the medium and long-term effects of that. So what we are doing here is exploring if there is an association between this childcare and education policies and family arrangements in Latin American countries, specifically how do inter-household gender gaps in paid and in unpaid work, hours of work, relate to the availability of these services. So we compare these gender gaps in time used within a household, within a couple, considering households with children and comparing with the gaps that prevail in couples whose children do not attend or attend or do not attend to these services. It's important again that we are not making of course an impact evaluation, this is just a first exploration of this relationship based on time use data. What we know about the effect of these services in paid and unpaid work, as I said, what we know is mainly for paid work. We know that the expansion of these services increased labor for participation of mothers with young children in developed countries, for example in Spain, in Canada, in the Netherlands, and the effects are in general a higher among women with lower levels of education or lower income levels. But again, there are differences by countries. For example, there are studies for Norway that show that mainly newly-subsidized childcare crowded out informal childcare, and so there were no effects on mothers' labor outcomes. Or in Sweden, which already had a well developed and highly subsidized childcare system, further expansions did not have an average impact on mothers' outcomes. So context and institutional settings are playing a role in this relationship. For Latin America, we have again mixed evidence for Argentina and for Nicaragua, we have positive effects of childcare services or childcare in the case of Nicaragua and preschool expansion in the case of Argentina. For the countries that we consider in this paper, which are Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay, we have again mixed evidence. The expansion of childcare in Chile did not have effects on female labor supply, and there you have the references. And the expansion of preschool provision for children aged three to five also did not have effects on labor market outcomes of mothers in Uruguay. Again, this is a case of crowded out from the private sector, from the private preschool, and there is also evidence of positive effects of the expansion of childcare in Colombia and also for the case of Mexico. But as I said, we do not have studies about the effect or the association with the hours of unpaid work. What many articles and what the literature shows is that these factors influence inter-household decisions about household within couples, but it's something that has not been explored. So what we are doing here is we will time use surveys for Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay. It's important that all of them are based on survey questions, so it's not their information. So the quality of the data is not so good as in developed countries, but it's the only available data for time use. In the case of Uruguay, the time use survey is a module in the household survey, and in the other three countries it is a special time use survey with national coverage. And we select household with a couple and at least one child under six years old. That means that they're in the charge. You have the percentage of households that we are selected in our final sample. It's around 30% of the sample formed by a couple and at least one child under six years old. The main characteristics of these households and one very important characteristic is a very high percentage of these households depend only on main learnings, and that goes from 40% in Chile to 50% in Colombia according to the survey. So a high percentage depends only on main learnings. And also we are I'm presenting the results that correspond to households where there are other adults in the household. So it's a high percentage of these households have a grandmother or grandfather, et cetera. We also have our results for only for parental households and they remain. So the main variables that we are looking at are total unpaid work. We have that variable for men and women. And we also split that the hours of unpaid work of each person in the hours that correspond to childcare hours and the hours that correspond to other domestic unpaid work like cooking, shopping, cleaning, et cetera. And we define within each household the gap in unpaid work as the difference between female and male hours dedicated to housework. And also we have that for the two types of unpaid housework. And we also look at the gap in paid hours. But in this case, defined as male, men or females, so that when we do our regressions, we can easily interpret the coefficients. The graph there what we are showing is that the gender gaps in unpaid work and the average gender gaps in unpaid work and in paid work in the four countries, the yellow bars correspond to households with children under our sample of household with children under six years old. The gaps are very significant. This is hours per week. And we have a very significant difference in the hours that men and women dedicate to housework in all the countries. And what we do is a very simple estimation trying to relate our outcomes, which are gender gaps in total unpaid work, gender gaps in childcare, gender gaps in other unpaid work, and gender gaps in paid work with the characteristics of the household which are and the couple, the main personal characteristics which are reflected in the set variable. And we include three binary variables that show the situation of the household that maybe all the children in the household attend to these services, whether childcare or preschool, some of the children attend and the others not. And the situation is that none of the children benefit from these services. We include, as I said, the traditional control variables for age and each square for both members of the couple, education, the presence of children of other ages, the Adami that indicates if the household hires domestic survey, if there are other adults, how many other adults, apart from the couple, et cetera. What we have in our sample is that in a high percentage in all countries, a relative high percentage of children are in the situation where all of them assist, all of the children under six years old assist to childcare or preschool, but also in a very high number of countries, none of them does. And the intermediate situation is like minor part of our sample. As you see here, we have very similar patterns in these four countries. So the general context, the gaps, no, we are not. I will go through that. All these countries have different systems. And the hours dedicated, here we have let's look at the gender gap in unpaid work that is there divided by the part that corresponds to childcare, which is the blue one and the green one is the other unpaid work within the household. And in all countries, the gap is split between these two types of types, except in Uruguay where the difference in terms of childcare are lower than in the other countries. These are the rates of attendance. I just, I will just mark that for very small children, one, two, three years old, we have low rates in all countries. And then for the four and five years, we have good coverage in all countries. But for the whole, we are in a situation where half of the children below six years are attending any kind of service of childcare or education. Other thing that we do not have, or we only have for Colombia, Chile is a number of hours. So if for the other two countries, we cannot control for that. But let me show some results. This is, I'm only presenting the coefficients related to the binary variables that discriminate if all the children attend, if some of them do, or if none of them does, do. The first column is Kerwer, childcare. The other, the second is housework. And the third column is the difference, sorry, is the total gap in unpaid work. So we have Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay. And in the four countries, what we have in the red circle is that when all children attend, there is a significant reduction in the gap in total unpaid work. That is the third column. And that is driven by the reduction in time dedicated to care work. The coefficients are quite similar for the three countries, except for Chile, that they are higher. It is hours per week. And also in the situation where some of the children attend the services and the others not, it's equivalent that the situation where none of the children go to the services. What drives this reduction in the gap? Here what we do is we estimate the hours of paid, of each type of unpaid work for women and men. And this is not all this, but similar related regressions. And what we see there is that the red cycles try to show that in all cases, the reduction is driven by the reduction in the time dedicated by women to childcare. There is no change in the time in the association with the time that men dedicate only a small change in the only in Chile and Uruguay. There are some small reductions that are in green there. So in terms of the hours that men and women dedicate to other types of housework, there is no significant correlation. The other part of the of the results refer to gaps within each household in paid work and in total work, total work is of course the sum of those types. And we have a reduction in this gap also. Remember that this gap was defined as male minus female hours dedicated within the household. And the reductions are higher for example in Uruguay and in Chile than in the other two countries. But total work, total time dedicated to work whether paid or unpaid does not change or does not have any significant variation. Yes, per week. And again when we when we we do these estimations separately for men and women to try to see this reduction in the in the in the in the number of hours dedicated to paid work, what is driven what drives this and it's mainly the increasing in the time that women dedicate to paid work in in all in all the countries. And also again, we have like only only significant results when all the children are attending the services or education. Yes, so basically the reduction in the in the gender gap in paid work is basically because of the increase in the number of paid hours by women. No changes, no association with with changes in immense time dedicated to pay or unpaid work. If we do if we exclude households with children under one year old that may be too small to attend the services, the results remain and the and they are stronger if we restrict our sample only to households formed by by a couple with no other adults living in the household. So we exclude new new composite or extended households. And also when we split our sample between trying to see the effect for smaller children and older ones, smaller like a smaller younger than three years old, the results are in the in the we can see them in the in both groups. So basically what what we are exploring as a as a first approximation to the relationship between these services and time and time use within the households is that the assistance is associated to a decline in the gender gap in and paid and in paid work within households. And this is mainly driven by the by changes for women and there are no changes for men. There are no significant effects in total hours of work. It's like a substitution and the changes are associated almost entirely with changes in women's allocation of time when all the children attend to to the services. So incomplete that in attendance is equivalent to not children attend basically. So that's it.