Maternal Employment and Adolescent Development

Christopher Ruhm ()

No 10691, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This study investigates how maternal employment is related to the outcomes of 10 and 11 year olds after controlling for a wide variety of child, mother and family background characteristics. The results suggest that the mother's labor supply has deleterious effects on cognitive development, obesity and possibly risky behaviors such as smoking or drinking, while reducing behavior problems. These negative consequences are quite small for the average child, however, and usually restricted to relatively long maternal work hours. Less intensive employment is often associated with favorable outcomes and labor supply after the first three years typically has little effect. By contrast, large adverse consequences are frequently obtained for advantaged' adolescents, with negative impacts predicted even for limited amounts of maternal labor supply and for work during the child's fourth through ninth year.

JEL-codes: I12 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
Date: 2004-08
Note: HE CH
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10691.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
Working Paper: Maternal Employment and Adolescent Development (2005)
Journal Article: Maternal employment and adolescent development (2008)
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:nbr:nberwo:10691

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w10691
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().