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Title: Maternal Time, Child Care and Child Cognitive Development: The Case of Single Mothers
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Bernal, Raquel Keane, Michael P. |
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Maternal Time, Child Care and Child Cognitive Development: The Case of Single Mothers Presented: London, England, Econometric Society World Congress, 19-24 August, 2005, University College London. Also: http://eswc2005.econ.ucl.ac.uk/papers/ESWC/2005/1405/Bernal_Keane_Maternal%20Time_01_2005.pdf Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79 Publisher: Econometric Society Keyword(s): Child Care; Child Support; Children, Academic Development; Maternal Employment; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. This paper evaluates the effects of maternal time inputs and alternative providers' time inputs on children's cognitive development using the sample of single mothers in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). In order to deal with the selection problem that arises when trying to assess the impact of mothers' employment and child care choices on children's development, we take advantage of the exogenous variation in employment and child care choices generated by the differences in welfare regulations across states and over time introduced by the Welfare Reform (1996) and prior to that by Section 1115 Welfare Waivers. In particular, we construct a comprehensive set of welfare policy variables at the individual and State level and use them as instrumental variables in order to identify the effects of maternal employment, child care and labor income on children's cognitive development. The results indicate that the effect of maternal employment on children's achievement is positive but insignificant. The effect of child care use is negative, significant and rather sizeable. In particular, one additional quarter of child use is associated with a reduction of 0.50% in test scores. In addition, the effect of income is significant and positive and in most cases large enough to offset the negative effect of child care. Finally, the negative effect of child care seems to be related to a significant negative effect of child care used after the first year after childbirth and mostly from the use of informal child care. |
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Bibliography Citation
Bernal, Raquel and Michael P. Keane. "Maternal Time, Child Care and Child Cognitive Development: The Case of Single Mothers." Presented: London, England, Econometric Society World Congress, 19-24 August, 2005, University College London. |