Early Childhood Investments in Human Capital: Parental Resources and Preferences

Sonia Bhalotra

Bristol Economics Discussion Papers from School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: This paper investigates the way in which parental human capital investment in young co-resident children varies with their own consumption. It is motivated by rejection of parental altruism in recent research, the unexpectedly small effects of parental income on child outcomes found in a number of studies, and the claim in several historical and anthropological studies of child labour that parents are selfish. Models of child labour and human capital typically assume parental altruism and, in many cases, this assumption is critical to the model. The results suggest that, in the preference function of parents, child human capital is a normal good and that child labour is a bad, consistent with altruism.

Keywords: altruism; m-demands; intra-household allocation; cash transfers; child poverty; tobacco (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C2 I2 O1 R2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2004-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-geo and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/efm/media/workingpapers/w ... pdffiles/dp04562.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bri:uobdis:04/562

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Bristol Economics Discussion Papers from School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vicky Jackson ().