Maternal Education, Home Environments and the Development of Children and Adolescents

Pedro Carneiro (), Costas Meghir () and Matthias Parey

No 6505, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We study the intergenerational effects of maternal education on children's cognitive achievement, behavioural 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 behavioural 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 labour 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.

Keywords: Child Development; Education; Intergenerational Mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-ltv
Date: Written
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cepr.org/pubs/dps/DP6505.asp (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Maternal education, home environments and the development of children and adolescents (2007)
Working Paper: Maternal Education, Home Environments and the Development of Children and Adolescents (2007)
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: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:6505

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.cepr.org/pubs/dps/DP6505.asp

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers
Address: Centre for Economic Policy Research, 53--56 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DG
Series data maintained by ().