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Title: A Dynamic Analysis of Women's Labor Supply, Fertility and Child Development: Is Maternal Employment Bad for Child Development?
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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? Ph.D. Dissertation, State University of New York - Stony Brook, 2002 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning Keyword(s): Birth Order; Child Health; Cognitive Ability; Cognitive Development; Fertility; Hispanics; Maternal Employment; Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT); Simultaneity In my thesis I analyze the effects of time and material resource on children's cognitive development. Specifically, in the first part of the thesis I analyze whether the birth order, the completed family size, and mother's time spent in the labor market is detrimental for young children's cognitive development. Unlike previous work, I use a sample of all children born to a women based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979 cohort). Employing panel estimation techniques I find that the 'effect' of maternal employment on child development varies by age of the child (stage of development), as well as by race/ethnicity and educational attainment of the mother. The estimates show that the findings in the previous literature primarily pertain to the situation of children of mothers with no post-secondary education. I also find evidence that the number of older siblings in the family during infancy (birth order), a closely-spaced younger sibling, and the completed family size are detrimental for children's cognitive development. In the second part of the thesis, I formulate and estimate a discrete time and discrete choice dynamic programming model of labor supply in which fertility decisions and woman's time allocated to the labor market are explicit choice variables. In this framework I incorporate child development as a two stage production process consisting of the determination of physical health and cognitive ability. The behavioral predictions based on the estimates from the NLSY data show that the model can capture the decline in women's labor force participation during the first year of the child's life. The negative effect of maternal employment during the first year of the child's life and the disadvantage of being late in the birth order is confirmed by the structural estimates. Policy simulations show that a legislation that supports paid maternity leave during the year after birth reduces the risk of having a low ability child b y 6% among white and Hispanic families. Moreover, policies that provide incentives to have larger families are shown to have adverse effects on the cognitive development of children. |
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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? Ph.D. Dissertation, State University of New York - Stony Brook, 2002. |