The demand for school meal services by Swiss households

In this paper we investigate the household demand for childcare during lunchtime at school using a stated preferences approach. Data are collected through phone-structured interviews to 905 residents with children in the German-speaking region of Switzerland during 2007. Poisson models with random and …xed e¤ects are used to explore factors a¤ecting the demand. Ordinal probit models are also considered as an alternative to count data models. The results show that price, household income, satisfaction with the current childcare service, family composition, and the area of residence signi…cantly affect the number of weekly services demanded. We estimate that the willingness to pay for childcare during lunchtime is between 7.90 and 11.70 Swiss francs per day and does not depend on household income. Keywords: Childcare service, school meal service, panel count data, Poisson regression, willingness to pay, ordinal probit model. JEL classi…cation: D12, H31, H42, J13 Department of Economics, University of Lugano and ETH Zurich, Switzerland. yDepartment of Engineering, University of Bergamo, Italy and Department of Economics, University of Lugano, Switzerland. Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]. The empirical analysis reported in this paper exploits a dataset built for a project commissioned to the Institute of Economics at the University of Lugano and …nanced by four Swiss cantons (Aargau, Basel-City, Basel-Land and Solothurn). zDepartment of Economics, University of Lugano, Switzerland.