Causal Effects of Paternity Leave on Children and Parents

Reserving a share of the parental leave period for fathers is considered necessary in order to induce fathers to take leave, and to increase men's participation in child‐rearing. We investigate how a parental leave reform directed towards fathers affected leave‐taking, and, in turn, children's and parents' long‐term outcomes. A paternal leave quota greatly increases the share of men taking paternity leave. We find evidence that children's school performance improves as a result, particularly in families where the father has higher education than the mother. We find no evidence that paternity leave counters the traditional allocation of parents' labor supply.     

Effect of Parental Migration on Children's Health in Rural China

Using 2003–2006 RCRE (Research Center for Rural Economy) panel data, we estimate the effect of parental migration on the health of children left behind, with a difference‐in‐differences and propensity score matching combined model. On average we do not find any significant effect on children's health; however, the effect varies among different groups. Children's health may improve as a result of parental migration in families with lower income in the base year and families with higher‐income growth rates. Furthermore, children's health may deteriorate with maternal migration but improve with longer distance of paternal migration and longer time of paternal migration. We argue that parental migration affects children's health through complex mechanisms: income increase may have a positive impact while decreased parental care may have a negative effect. The two effects seem to offset each other in rural China.     

Raising productivity with pension premium

We argue that parents underinvest in growing their own children's capability in the absence of property rights over their future income, and that causes economic waste. No amount of collaborative choice among contemporary adults for public education could eliminate it because they face a resource constraint set by their predecessors. Such intergenerational dependence requires an intergenerational contract instead. It involves rewarding parents with a pension premium tied to their own children's taxable income paired with a matching subsidy to parental expenditure. We show how it fully internalizes the intergenerational externality, related to parenting, to eliminate economic waste and, thereby, to raise labor productivity and economic welfare. Our quantitative analysis of a baseline economy reveals significant welfare gains in economies with population ageing coupled with a low degree of parental care for children's future welfare and high returns to parental expenditure on children.     

Do family resources matter? Educational attainment during transition in Poland*

We analyse the relationship between family background and children's educational attainment in the 1990s in Poland. If parental poverty affects children's educational prospects, the increase in social inequalities observed in the Polish transition process will be transmitted between generations. We apply an ordered probit model of educational attainment on longitudinal data from the Polish Labour Force Survey. Surprisingly, parents’ income and their labour market status have only a weak impact on children's education. Parents’ schooling, however, is strongly related to children's, and so are household structure, city size, and region of residence. We conclude that, if transmission of inequality takes place between generations, this seems to be primarily caused by the inheritance of human capital rather than by pure wealth effects.     

Persistent inequality: An explanation based on limited parental altruism

This paper proposes an alternative theory for the observed persistence in income inequality across households, a theory based on limited parental altruism. We argue that the degree of parental altruism is ‘limited’ by the economic status of the parent. A poor parent not only has less ability, but also has less willingness to invest in children's human capital formation. This generates a non-linearity in such investment expenditures. As a result, initial income differences may perpetuate over time—even with convex technology and convex preferences. In this context, we also compare the efficacy of the public vis-à-vis the private education system from the perspective of long run growth.     

Educational expenditure in urban China: income effects,family characteristics and the demand for domestic and overseas education

Analysing survey data from 32 selected cities across China in 2003, this article examines parents’ expenditure on their children's education from two aspects: factors affecting domestic education expenditure and factors affecting expenditure on overseas education. The main findings that emerge from this study are as follows. First, household income has significant effects on the magnitude of the domestic and overseas educational expenditures. Second, households where mothers have senior secondary school or college education, and fathers are working in professional occupations are likely to spend more on education for their children. Third, being in the highest income category, having a college-educated father, having a mother who is a cadre or middle professional and living in a coastal area significantly enhances the probabilities for the households sending their children overseas for education.     

The effect of family background on children's level of schooling attainment in Spain

This paper provides microeconomic estimates of the role played by family background in determining children's level of schooling attainment in Spain. We use an ordered logit model to explore the effects of family background and other supply factors on the probability of various educational outcomes. Our estimates are based on household data obtained from the ECVT, Living and Working Conditions Survey (Ministerio de Economía y Hacienda, 1985), a Spanish nation-wide household survey conducted at the end of 1985. In general, and given the Spanish capital constraints, parental income, social class, and family size, explain children's level of schooling. These results are consistent with those of the literature that focuses on the role of family background in determining schooling attainment.     

The Effect of Parental and Grandparental Supervision Time Investment on Children's Early-Age Development

This article explores the impact of grandparents’ supervision time input relative to the effect of parents’ childcare provision on children's cognitive, social and behavioral development at an early age. We identify the effects of interest through panel data estimation methods. The findings provide evidence of complementarity between parental and grandparental involvement in the child-rearing process. Specifically, grandparental care has a stronger effect than parental intervention on the vocabulary skills of the child. However, parents’ time input in the child has a larger impact than does the supervision time investment of grandparents on the socio-behavioral development and the picture similarities measure of cognitive ability of children between 3 and 6 years old.     

International migration,remittances, and schooling: evidence from El Salvador

We examine the effect of remittances from abroad on households' schooling decisions using data for El Salvador. Following the massive war-related emigration of the 1980s, remittances became a significant source of household income throughout the 1990s. We use the Cox proportional hazard model to examine the determinants of school attendance. Measuring income from a source that is uncorrelated with parental schooling—remittances—, we find that remittances have a large, significant effect on school retention. We estimate that while household income net of remittances has a small, though significant, impact on the hazard of leaving school in rural and urban areas, remittances have a much larger impact on the hazard of leaving school. In urban areas, the effect of remittances is, at its smallest, 10 times the size of the effect of other income. In rural areas, the effect of remittances is about 2.6 times that of other income. Our finding is of interest in that it suggests that subsidizing school attendance, particularly in poor areas, may have a large impact on school attendance and retention, even if parents have low levels of schooling.     

Heterogeneity in Early Life Investments: A Longitudinal Analysis of Children's Time Use

We examine socioeconomic heterogeneity in children's time use using diary data from two waves of a nationally representative longitudinal cohort study in Ireland. Children from disadvantaged households spend significantly less time reading, doing homework, and engaging in physical exercise and sport than their counterparts, and more time engaging in unstructured play. Though most gaps are relatively small at age 9, they widen considerably by age 13. This pattern is similar for girls and boys. Parental education appears to be a more important factor in family investment decisions about children's time use than household income. Given the important role of extra-curricular activities in promoting cognitive and non-cognitive skill development, the systematic differences in children's time use we document in this paper may contribute to cumulative disadvantage and widening skill gaps through adolescence and into adulthood.     

Survival of the gene,intergenerational transfers and precautionary saving

This paper provides a model of bequest and investment in children's human capital at low incomes. It posits that parents and children are linked through their common concern of grandchildren and intergenerational transfers provide a material basis for the perpetuation of the family line. The model characterizes intergenerational strategic interactions in a dynamic game theoretical framework. Moreover, it explores intergenerational uncertainty as a source of precautionary saving. In contrast with the existing literature, the model implies that there are qualitative differences between precautionary saving from one's own income uncertainty and precautionary bequests from children's income uncertainty.     

Intergenerational transfer,human capital and long-term growth in China under the one child policy

We suggest that the demographic changes caused by the one child policy (OCP) may not harm China's long-term growth. This is because of the higher human capital accumulation induced by the intergenerational transfer arrangements under China's poor-functioning formal social security system. Parents raise their children and depend on them for support when they reach an advanced age. A decrease in the number of children prompted by the OCP results in parents investing more in their children's education to ensure retirement consumption. In addition, decreased childcare costs strengthen educational investment through an income effect. Using a calibrated model, a benchmark with the OCP is compared to three counterfactual experiments without the OCP. Output in 2025 without OCP decreases about 4% under moderate estimates. The output gain comes from a greatly increased educational investment driven by fewer children (11.4 years of schooling rather than 8.1). Our model sheds new light on the prospects of China's long-term growth by emphasizing the OCP's growth enhancing role through human capital formation under intergenerational transfer arrangements.     

Child Schooling and Work Decisions in India: The Role of Household and Regional Gender Equity

Abstract

This paper tests three hypotheses about how mothers' autonomy in India affects their children's participation in school and the labor market. To do so it extends the concept of mothers' autonomy beyond the household to include the constraints imposed by the extent of gender equity in the regions in which these women live. This study began with the expectation that increased autonomy for Indian mothers living in heterosexual households would increase child schooling and decrease child work. However, the results are mixed, indicating that mother's autonomy can be reinforced or constrained by the environment. The paper concludes that mothers and fathers in India make different decisions for girls vis-à-vis boys and that the variables reflecting mothers' autonomy vary in their impact, so that mothers' level of education relative to fathers' is not often statistically significant, while mothers' increased contributions to household expenditure decrease the probability of schooling and girls' work.     

Sorting and inequality in Canadian schools

A student's peers are often thought to influence his or her educational outcomes. If so, an unequal distribution of advantaged and disadvantaged students across schools (“sorting”) in a community will amplify existing inequalities. This paper explores the relationship between the degree of sorting across schools within a community and educational inequality as measured by the variance of standardized high school exam scores within the community. Cross-sectional OLS estimates suggest that the variance of test scores is related to sorting by ethnicity, but not to sorting by income or parental education. We then implement two strategies for addressing endogeneity in the degree of sorting: a standard unobserved effects (first-difference) approach, and a first-difference/instrumental variables approach in which the structure of school choice (number and relative size of schools) is used to construct instruments for the degree of sorting. The results from both approaches indicate that the variance of test scores is related to sorting by home language and parental education, but not to sorting by income. Our results also suggest that reducing sorting would have little effect on inequality of outcomes in the typical Alberta community, but would have substantial effects in the larger cities.     

Intergenerational Mobility in the United States and Great Britain: A Comparative Study of Parent–Child Pathways

We build on cross‐national research to examine the relationships underlying estimates of relative intergenerational mobility in the United States and Great Britain using harmonized longitudinal data and focusing on men. We examine several pathways by which parental status is related to offspring status, including education, labor market attachment, occupation, marital status, and health, and perform several sensitivity analyses to test the robustness of our results. We decompose differences between the two nations into that part attributable to the strength of the relationship between parental income and the child's characteristics and the labor market return to those child characteristics. We find that the relationships underlying these intergenerational linkages differ in systematic ways between the two nations. In the United States, primarily because of the higher returns to education and skills, the pathway through offspring education is relatively more important than it is in Great Britain; by contrast, in Great Britain the occupation pathway forms the primary channel of intergenerational persistence.     

The curse of low expectations

We examine how a remedial education programme for primary school‐age children affects parental expectations about their children's future. Using original survey data we collected in Serbia, we investigate whether expectations on labour market prospects and educational attainment change as a consequence of exposure to the Roma Teaching Assistant programme. Our results show that parents of pupils in treated schools expect higher returns to education for their children and are more likely to expect them to achieve a secondary level of education. We also investigate the possible mechanisms in place due to the characteristics of the programme: remedial education and role model.     

我国居民家庭子女教育投资动机的经济学分析

我国城市居民家庭在子女教育投资方面,一般会受到流动性约束的影响,并且父母的当期收入会影响到对子女当期教育的投资;父母对于子女教育投资的动机主要符合贷款合同模型,即父母对于子女的教育投资是暗含后期回报的合同,这一合同主要通过家庭的某种内在机制和社会道德标准来执行的.基于这样的结论,笔者认为,为扩大父母对子女教育方面的合理投资,国家应该建立健全教育方面的金融渠道,提供符合我国国情的教育贷款或保险,使父母对子女的教育的投资更加平滑.     

Analysis of School Enrollment in Ghana: A Sequential Approach

In this paper, we depart from the standard way of analyzing school enrollment by accounting explicitly for educational selectivity in order to examine the determinants of child school enrollment in Ghana. Using data from the Ghana Living Standard Survey round 6 (GLSS 6), we estimate a three‐step sequential logit model for the determinants of secondary school enrollment and its dependence on completing primary school. We find that family resources such as parental education, household income and the gender of the head of the household play a role in households' child schooling decisions. Educated parents are relatively more likely to enroll their children in primary school and keep them in school until they complete primary education. As well, we show that educated parents do not promote a gender‐biased investment in the schooling of children at the primary level. While household welfare does not influence children's entry into primary school importantly, their completion of primary school depends on household welfare. The study sheds more light on the pro‐male bias phenomenon regarding entry into primary school and primary school completion. Policies to promote the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 4 in Ghana must be grade sensitive.     

2022 KLEIN LECTURE PARENTAL EDUCATION AND INVENTION: THE FINNISH ENIGMA

Why is invention strongly positively correlated with parental income not only in the United States but also in Finland, which displays low income inequality and high social mobility? Using data on 1.45 M Finnish individuals and their parents, we find the following: (i) the positive association between parental income and off-spring probability of inventing is greatly reduced when controlling for parental education; (ii) instrumenting for the parents having an MSc degree using distance to nearest university reveals a large causal effect of parental education on offspring probability of inventing; and (iii) the causal effect of parental education has been markedly weakened by the introduction in the early 1970s of a comprehensive schooling reform.     

Gender Differences in Italian Children's Capabilities

This paper analyzes children's well-being using the capability approach, with a special focus on gender differences. The two areas analyzed are the capability of senses, imagination, and thought; and the capability of play. Using data from the 2008 Multipurpose Survey on Daily Life released by the Italian National Institute of Statistics, a structural equation model is estimated in which the capabilities are defined as latent variables that are intrinsically interrelated. For each capability, a set of indicators of functionings is utilized and the effects of individual and social conversion factors – including parents’ unpaid work, their level of education, and employment status – are analyzed. The model is applied to Italian girls and boys ages 6–10 in 2008. The analysis confirms that the two capabilities are interrelated. Policies aimed at improving children's achievements in education also improve the capability of play and vice versa. Differences by gender occur in the factors’ effects.