Daycare Matching with Siblings: Social Implementation and Welfare Evaluation
Kan Kuno, Daisuke Moriwaki, Yoshihiro Takenami

TL;DR
This paper develops an empirical framework for daycare assignment that accounts for sibling complementarities, showing that sibling priority policies can significantly improve welfare and reduce inequality.
Contribution
It introduces a model explicitly incorporating sibling complementarities in daycare assignment and evaluates welfare effects of sibling priority reforms.
Findings
Split assignments cause significant disutility, over twice the average commuting distance.
Sibling priority reform increases welfare by 6.4% and reduces inequality.
Ignoring sibling complementarities underestimates potential welfare gains.
Abstract
In centralized assignment problems, agents may have preferences over joint rather than individual assignments, such as couples in residency matching or siblings in school choice and daycare. Standard preference estimation methods typically ignore such complementarities. This paper develops an empirical framework that explicitly incorporates them. Using data from daycare assignment in a municipality in Japan, we estimate a model in which families incur both additional commuting distance and a fixed non-distance disutility when siblings are assigned to different facilities. We find that split assignment generates a large disutility, equivalent to more than twice the average commuting distance. We then simulate counterfactual assignment policies that vary the strength of sibling priority and evaluate welfare. The sibling priority reform that we designed and that was implemented in 2024…
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