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Title: Parental Employment and Child Cognitive Development
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Ruhm, Christopher J. |
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Parental Employment and Child Cognitive Development Working Paper, Greensboro, Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, May 2002. Also: http://depts.washington.edu/crfam/Symposium1/Ruhm.pdf Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79 Publisher: Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro Keyword(s): Cognitive Development; Employment; Maternal Employment; Mothers, Education; Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Math); Peabody Individual Achievement Test (PIAT- Reading); Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT); Work Hours/Schedule Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Revised version of NBER Working Paper W7666, April 2000 (http://papers.nber.org/papers/w7666). This study investigates the relationship between parental employment and child cognitive development using data from multiple years of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Maternal labor supply during the first three years of the child's life is predicted to have a small negative effect on the verbal ability of 3 and 4 year olds and a substantial detrimental impact on the reading and math achievement of 5 and 6 year olds. Working during the second and third years appears to have less favorable or more deleterious consequences when the mother is also employed in the first year. The results are robust to the inclusion of controls for day care arrangements or paternal job-holding and there is some indication that early employment may be particularly costly for children in traditional' two-parent families. Finally, the data suggest that paternal and maternal employment have qualitatively similar effects, hinting at the importance of time investments by fathers. The overall conclusion is that previous research may have provided an overly optimistic assessment of the effects of parental employment on child cognitive development. |
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Bibliography Citation
Ruhm, Christopher J. "Parental Employment and Child Cognitive Development." Working Paper, Greensboro, Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, May 2002. |