To Work or Not to Work? Child Development and Maternal Labor Supply

Paul Frijters, David Johnston, Manisha Shah () and Michael Shields

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2009, vol. 1, issue 3, 97-110

Abstract: We estimate the effect of early child development on maternal labor force participation. Mothers of poorly developing children may remain at home to care for their children. Alternatively, mothers may enter the labor force to pay for additional educational and health resources. Which action dominates is the empirical question we answer in this paper. We control for the potential endogeneity of child development by using an instrumental variables approach, uniquely exploiting exogenous variation in child development associated with child handedness. We find that a one unit increase in poor child development decreases maternal labor force participation by approximately 10 percentage points. (JEL J13, J16, J22)

JEL-codes: J13 J16 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
Note: DOI: 10.1257/app.1.3.97
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/app.1.3.97 (application/pdf)
http://www.aeaweb.org/aej/app/data/2008-0143_data.zip (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

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:aea:aejapp:v:1:y:2009:i:3:p:97-110

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics is currently edited by Alexandre Mas

More articles in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().