Equal access to childcare in Vienna: Location choice and pricing of private and public childcare institutions by neighbourhood socioeconomic status

Jubilee Fund of the City of Vienna for the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration

The starting point of the project is the finding that the spatial accessibility of crèches and kindergartens in Vienna varies between residential areas with different socio-economic status and is worse for lower status areas. The project aims at a more differentiated investigation of these inequalities, which are mainly caused by the choice of location of the nonprofit providers, in order to better understand the underlying causes and to identify strategies to achieve a more egalitarian accessibility. The following two questions will guide the research: How do individual private provider types - such as church providers, parent-administered providers, or "large" providers, such as Kinderfreunde or Kinder in Wien - differ in terms of spatial accessibility? How do providers of childcare facilities differ in terms of their educational concepts and pricing?