Reinforcement or compensation? Parental responses to children’s revealed human capital levels

Wei Fan () and Catherine Porter
Additional contact information
Wei Fan: Heriot-Watt University

Journal of Population Economics, 2020, vol. 33, issue 1, No 7, 233-270

Abstract: Abstract A small but increasing body of literature finds that parents invest in their children unequally. However, the evidence is contradictory, and providing convincing causal evidence of the effect of child ability on parental investment in a low-income context is challenging. This paper examines how parents respond to the differing abilities of primary school-aged Ethiopian siblings, using rainfall shocks during the critical developmental period between pregnancy and the first 3 years of a child’s life to isolate exogenous variations in child ability within the household, observed at a later stage than birth. The results show that on average parents attempt to compensate disadvantaged children through increased cognitive investment. The effect is significant, but small in magnitude: parents provide about 3.9% of a standard deviation more in educational fees to the lower-ability child in the observed pair. We provide suggestive evidence that families with educated mothers, smaller household size and higher wealth compensate with greater cognitive resources for a lower-ability child.

Keywords: Children; Human capital formation; Parental investment; Intrahousehold resource allocation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D13 J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00148-019-00752-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:jopoec:v:33:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1007_s00148-019-00752-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... tion/journal/148/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00148-019-00752-7

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Population Economics is currently edited by K.F. Zimmermann

More articles in Journal of Population Economics from Springer, European Society for Population Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().