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Title: Maternal Education, Home Environments and the Development of Children and Adolescents
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Carneiro, Pedro M.
Meghir, Costas
Parey, Matthias
Maternal Education, Home Environments and the Development of Children and Adolescents
IZA Discussion Paper No. 3072, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), September 2007.
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher: Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA)
Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Behavior Problems Index (BPI); Educational Aspirations/Expectations; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Mothers, Education; Parental Influences; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); School Progress; Variables, Instrumental

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

We study the intergenerational effects of maternal education on children's cognitive achievement, behavioral problems, grade repetition and obesity. We address endogeneity of maternal schooling by instrumenting with variation in schooling costs when the mother grew up. Using matched data from the female participants of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and their children, we can control for mother's ability and family background factors. Our results show substantial intergenerational returns to education. For children aged 7-8, for example, our IV results indicate that an additional year of mother's schooling increases the child's performance on a standardized math test by almost 0.1 of a standard deviation, and reduces the incidence of behavioral problems. Our data set allows us to study a large array of channels which may transmit the effect of maternal education to the child, including family environment and parental investments at different ages of the child. We find that income effects, delayed childbearing, and assortative mating are likely to be important, and we show that maternal education leads to substantial differences in maternal labor supply. We investigate heterogeneity in returns, and we present results focusing both on very early stages in the child's life as well as adolescent outcomes. We present a falsification exercise to support the validity of our instruments, and our results are found to be robust in a sensitivity analysis. We discuss policy implications and relate our findings to intergenerational mobility.
Bibliography Citation
Carneiro, Pedro M., Costas Meghir and Matthias Parey. "Maternal Education, Home Environments and the Development of Children and Adolescents." IZA Discussion Paper No. 3072, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), September 2007.