The secular increase over the past several decades in the number of families where both the husband and wife work in the paid labor force, coupled with the surge in labor force participation of single mothers in the 1990s, has heightened policy focus on child care options for working parents; federal and state governments are now major players in the provision of child care in the United States. The purpose of this report is to provide a selective survey of the literature on the economic consequences of child care for recipient families, and to relate the results to families residing in Kentucky using data from the Annual Social and Economic Study in the Current Population Survey. The survey is selective both because of its exclusive focus on child care research by economists and because the literature is vast even within economics such that only articles deemed to be important contributions to the labor supply and child care literature are included. The literature review reveals that in the domain of child care the economics profession has focused primarily on the labor-market consequences of child care subsidies, particularly the effect of subsidies on the decision to work, on total hours of work conditional on being employed, on hourly wages, and on whether to use formal child care. There is less extensive evidence on the effects of child care subsidies on welfare participation, on school attendance, and job satisfaction, and no direct evidence on the issue of the anti-poverty effectiveness of child care subsidies. Most of the papers reviewed contain estimated elasticities of employment with respect to the price of child care, indicating labor-market participation responsiveness to any given change in the price of child care. (Contains 11 footnotes and 5 tables.) [Additional financial support for this report was provided by the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services.]