Microeconomist Katharine Sadowski, PhD, is one of the newest faculty members at the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, where her research focuses on child care systems and the workforce.

Sadowski, who received her doctoral degree in public policy from Cornell University, will teach Economics of Early Childhood in the spring quarter. She studies how policy affects children, families, and the workforce, with the ultimate goal of understanding how to build a child care economy that meets the needs of both families and workers.

In this Q&A, Sadowski talks about her current projects using U.S. Census and IRS data, what she’s most excited to work on at Stanford, and what she hopes policymakers understand about the fragility of the current child care workforce.

Tell me about your background and what drew you to studying child care policy and workforce issues.

I am an applied microeconomist working at the intersection of education and labor economics. I study child care because it is the foundation for children’s later life outcomes and despite billions of dollars in public investment, access to child care – and especially access to developmentally enriching environments – remains highly unequal. I find it extremely frustrating that a sector of the industry that affects millions of people a year, from children to parents to workers, is so understudied. My research uses quasi-experimental methods and data science tools to examine how policies affect children, families, and workers, with the goal of understanding how to build child care systems that prepare all children for school while sustaining a stable, skilled workforce.

What questions about early childhood policy are you most excited to explore at Stanford?

At Stanford, I am most excited to partner with local governments to expand access to evidence-based early care and education that fosters foundational skill formation, ensuring children enter kindergarten with the readiness required for long-term academic success. My work focuses on understanding how policies that increase child care access interact with workforce dynamics, including educator recruitment, retention, and turnover. I am also interested in designing and rigorously evaluating interventions that increase pre-K enrollment among low-income children and examining how expanded access affects kindergarten readiness. In parallel, I seek to identify which forms of training and credentials in the early childhood workforce are most strongly linked to children’s early learning outcomes. Ultimately, my goal is to ensure that access-expanding policies are paired with workforce investments so that all children can benefit from stable, high-quality classroom environments.

What projects are you currently working on?

I am currently working on several projects that estimate the impacts of local, state, and federal policies on early childhood labor markets, parents, and families. This includes ongoing work using restricted access Census and IRS data to examine the effects of minimum wage increases and universal pre-K expansions on child care supply, employment, and children’s long-term outcomes. In parallel, I am leading a nationwide data collection where I am developing data systems to measure child care supply in near real time with the goal of identifying how policy changes affect availability and which regions of the U.S. face persistent supply constraints. Across these projects, I am especially focused on understanding how to sustain a stable early educator workforce.

What are you teaching this quarter and how is teaching going?

I will be teaching Economics of Early Childhood in the spring quarter. The course examines how early care and education markets operate, fail, and respond to policy, organized around four core stakeholders: children, workers, families, and providers. Through this structure, students build intuition about incentives, constraints, and trade-offs in a sector characterized by heavy regulation, thin profit margins, and significant information frictions. I am excited to help students grapple with the real-world complexity of early childhood policy and develop tools to think critically about market design and policy trade-offs.

What do you hope the public and policymakers understand better about child care as a result of your work?

I hope my work helps policymakers better understand the trade-offs inherent in child care policy and the importance of designing interventions that work across all stakeholders. Policies often aim to support children or families without fully accounting for how they affect providers and the educator workforce, which can lead to unintended consequences. The child care workforce is particularly fragile, with high turnover and persistent retention challenges, making it difficult to sustain quality at scale. My goal is to inform policies that expand access while maintaining a stable, well-supported workforce and improving outcomes for children, families, and providers alike.