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Title: Effects of Women's Employment and Fertility Decisions on the Cognitive Development of Young Children: The Role of Mother's Education
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Heiland, Frank |
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Effects of Women's Employment and Fertility Decisions on the Cognitive Development of Young Children: The Role of Mother's Education Presented: Minneapolis, MN, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, May 2003 Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79 Publisher: Population Association of America Keyword(s): Fertility; Maternal Employment; Modeling, Fixed Effects; Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. In this paper I investigate the effects of time and material resources on children's cognitive development conditional on the educational attainment of the mother. Specifically, for two broad classes of mothers educational attainment separately, I analyze whether the birth order, the completed family size, mother's time spent in the labor market, and poor health of a child at birth are detrimental for young children's cognitive development. Recent studies by Blau and Grossberg (1992), Han et. al (2001), and Waldfogel et al. (2002) concluded that there exists a negative relationship between maternal employment during the first year after the child's birth and the child's cognitive ability as measured by the revised Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT-R). However, no negative effect was found for employment during the second and subsequent years after the childs birth. To the contrary, Blau and Grossberg (1992) and Waldfogel et al. (2002) provided evidence that suggested that employment is beneficial after the first year. None of the previous studies examined whether these employment effects are consistent across educational groups. I use a sample of all children born to a woman based on data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). The previous findings relied on smaller samples and on samples from earlier rounds of the NLSY79. As a result their findings may reflect effects that are characteristic of the situation in which children of young and less-educated mothers are raised. Moreover, by using these data, family fixed-effects and sibling first-differencing panel estimates can be obtained which will correct for any potential bias that may arise from unobserved heterogeneity at the family level in the estimated input effects. |
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Bibliography Citation
Heiland, Frank. "Effects of Women's Employment and Fertility Decisions on the Cognitive Development of Young Children: The Role of Mother's Education." Presented: Minneapolis, MN, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, May 2003. |