1,721,053 research outputs found
Do parental time investments react to changes in child's skills and health?
Full text linkParental time investment decisions have been found to have important effects on child development; however, little is known about the response of parents to changes in their child's human capital across time. Using the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, we measure time investments considering the time young children spend, with or without parents, in different activities. By adopting a child fixed-effect instrumental variable estimation, we find that parents reinforce for high socio-emotional skills by spending more time socialising with their child and compensate for low cognitive skills by increasing the time the child spends in learning activities
Differences in delaying Motherhood across European Countries: Empirical Evidence from the ECHP
No full textAge at motherhood has increased in most European Countries in the past decades. The main aim of
this paper is to assess the impact of women's education and work experience on the timing of first birth
across the European Union (EU).
According to the literature - based on income maximisation framework (Gustafsson 2001, Hotz et al.
1997) - women with a higher degree of education and a shorter work experience are more likely to
delay motherhood or to remain childless. However, recent micro-level studies have shown contradictory
empirical evidence. For instance, higher educated women or career women seem to enter motherhood
earlier in the Northern European Countries (Kravdal 1994, Hoem 2000, Andersson 2001). Conceivably,
these ambiguous findings might reflect substantial cross-country differences that we would like to point
out. Therefore, we conduct an analysis to explain how the probability to enter into motherhood differs
across 10 European Union countries by using the European Community Household Panel survey
(ECHP).
On one side, the gap between countries may reflect differences in the observed characteristics of the
national women populations, such as differences in the female labour participation and in the human
capital investment. On the other side, the gap may be instead due to different fertility propensities
across countries. In the empirical application we try to disentangle between these two reasons
Stressful Home Environment and the Child's Socio-Emotional Development
Full text linkChildren's early life socio-emotional skills predict long-run socio-economic outcomes, yet large disparities exist between these skills at early ages. In this paper, we study whether reducing home environmental stressors can reduce these early-life skill disparities, and how this depends on children’s pre-existing socio-emotional skills. To do so, we estimate a dynamic model of socio-emotional skill production that depends on parental investment, including the parent’s mental health and parenting style, and accounts for unobserved heterogeneity in child ability. Using the model, we find that improving sensitive parenting and mothers’ psychological well-being has a larger impact on children who have lower initial levels of socio-emotional skills. We also find that children’s pre-existing skills and parental inputs are substitutes, which has implications for which policies may best address later skill disparities
Gender Stereotypes in the Family
No full textWe study whether and why parents have gender-stereotyped beliefs when they assess their child's skills. Exploiting systematic differences in parental beliefs about a child's skills and blindly graded standardized test scores, we find that parents overestimate boys' skills more so than girls' in mathematics (a male-stereotyped subject), whereas there are no gender differences for reading. Consistent with an information friction hypothesis, we find that the parental gender bias disappears for parents who are interviewed after receiving information on their child's test scores. We further show that the parental gender bias in detriment of girls contributes to explain the widening of the gender gap in mathematical skills later in childhood, supporting the hypothesis that exposure to gender biases negatively influence girls' ability to achieve their full potential
The intergenerational transmission of liberal professions
Full text linkBy using university administrative and survey data on Italian graduates, we analyse the intergenerational transmission of liberal professions. We find that having a father who is a liberal professional has a positive and significant effect on the probability of a graduate of becoming a liberal professional. To assess the processes at work in this intergenerational transmission, we evaluate the effect of having a liberal professional father on the probabilities to undertake each of the compulsory steps required to become a liberal professional, which are choosing a university degree providing access to a liberal profession, completing a period of practice, passing a licensing exam and starting a liberal profession. Having a liberal professional father has a positive and statistically significant effect on the probability to complete a compulsory period of practice and to start a liberal profession; whereas there does not seem to be an effect on the type of degree chosen and on passing the licensing examination, at least after controlling for child’s and parental formal human capital
Parental and Child Time Investments and the Cognitive Development of Adolescents
Full text linkWhile a large literature has focused on the impact of parental investments on child cognitive development, very little is known about the role of the child’s own investments alongside that of the parents. By using the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we model the cognitive production function for adolescents using an augmented value-added model and adopt an estimation method that takes account of unobserved child characteristics. We find that a child’s own investments made during adolescence matter more than the mother’s. Our empirical results appear to be robust to several sensitivity checks
The Impact of Gender Role Norms on Mothers' Labor Supply
Full text linkWe study whether mothers' labor supply is shaped by the gender role attitudes of their peers. Using detailed information on a sample of UK mothers with dependent children, we find that having peers with gender-egalitarian norms leads mothers to be more likely to have a paid job and to have a greater share of the total number of paid hours worked within their household, but has no sizable effect on hours worked. Most of these effects are driven by less educated women. A new decomposition analysis allows us to estimate that approximately half of the impact on labor force participation is due to women conforming gender role attitudes to their peers', with the remaining half being explained by the spillover effect of peers' labor market behavior. These findings suggest that an evolution towards gender-egalitarian attitudes promotes gender convergence in labor market outcomes. In turn, a careful dissemination of statistics on female labor market behavior and attitudes may accelerate this convergence
Multiple sample selection in the estimation of intergenerational occupational mobility
Full text linkThe estimation of occupational mobility across generations can be biased because of different sample selection issues as, for example, selection into employment. Most empirical papers have either neglected sample selection issues or adopted Heckman-type correction methods. These methods are generally not adequate to estimate intergenerational mobility models. In this paper, we show how to use new methods to estimate linear and quantile intergenerational mobility equations taking account of multiple sample selection
Housework share between partners:Experimental evidence on gender-specific preferences
Full text linkThis paper uses a novel vignette-based experimental design to investigate the reasons underlying the gendered division of housework. We are particularly interested in the role of gender-specific preferences: are there differences in the utility that men and women derive from housework, and might these be responsible for the fact that women continue to do more housework than men? It is difficult to address these questions with conventional survey data, because of inherent problems with endogeneity and ex-post rationalization; our experimental design circumvents these problems. We find remarkably little evidence of any systematic gender differences in preferences, and a general inclination towards an equal distribution of housework; this suggests that the reasons for the gendered division of housework do not derive from gender differences in preferences, and must lie elsewhere
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