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Title: A Dynamic Analysis of Women's Labor Supply, Fertility and Child Development: Is Maternal Employment Bad for Child Development?
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Heiland, Frank |
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A Dynamic Analysis of Women's Labor Supply, Fertility and Child Development: Is Maternal Employment Bad for Child Development? Working Paper, Department of Economics, State University of New York-Stony Brook, January 2002. Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: Department of Economics, SUNY-Stony Brook Keyword(s): Birth Order; Children, Mental Health; Cognitive Development; Family Size; Fertility; Infants; Maternal Employment; Methods/Methodology; Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT); Preschool Children; Siblings; Simultaneity Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. In this paper I analyze women's employment and fertility decisions in the context of infants' physical and cognitive development. Specifically, I investigate whether maternal employment during the first year of the child's life and the existence of siblings are detrimental for children's cognitive development as suggested by recent work. Applying a similar reduced-form approach to the health production relation and using a larger sample of children, the negative effect of being late in the birth order or of having a (narrowly-spaced) younger sibling on a child's cognitive health is confirmed but the direct maternal employment effect is found to be smaller than suggested by some recent studies. Since the simultaneity of maternal employment, fertility and child health cannot be analyze in the single-equation framework, I formulate and estimate a discrete-time, discrete-choice dynamic programming model in which women's labor force status and fertility are choice variables. The effect of maternal time on the physical and cognitive health of a child during early childhood is embedded in the model via an innovative two-step health production technology. The model is estimated using individual-level data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979 cohort). Preliminary simulations indicate that a policy that provides paid maternal leave during the first year after birth leads to a small improvement of the developmental outcomes of children. Also, policies that allow births to be spaced less narrowly are shown to be beneficial for young children's cognitive ability. |
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Bibliography Citation
Heiland, Frank. "A Dynamic Analysis of Women's Labor Supply, Fertility and Child Development: Is Maternal Employment Bad for Child Development?" Working Paper, Department of Economics, State University of New York-Stony Brook, January 2002. |