(joint with Pia S. Schober and C. Katharina Spieß)
In Germany, large heterogeneity exists with respect to the quality of early childhood education and care (ECEC) institutions. We examine whether children from socioeconomically advantaged families face more favorable conditions when starting their educational career by attending ECEC centers of better quality compared to more disadvantaged children. We exploit a new dataset combining the SOEP (wave 2013) with information from the K²ID-SOEP extension study on the ECEC facilities attended by respondents’ offspring. Our final sample consists of 764 children attending 700 day-care groups in 646 centers across Germany. We test if maternal employment status, parental education, children’s migration background and family income are systematically linked to a wide range of indicators capturing aspects of structural, orientation and process quality. Our results point to significant associations of some indicators mainly with work status and parental education, disadvantaging children of the least educated women and women working part-time or less. We find these relationships primarily for quality indicators that are easy to observe or enquire about for parents.