Quality time: How parents' schooling affects child health through its interaction with childcare time in Bangladesh

David Bishai ()

Health Economics, 1996, vol. 5, issue 5, 383-407

Abstract: A child health production function is presented with the key feature being an interaction term between a caregiver's schooling and their exposure time to the child. The production function is estimated using a 2SLS fixed effects model with lagged childcare time, resource allocation and child health as instruments for the first differences of these same endogenous variables. The 1978 Intrafamily Food Distribution and Feeding Practices Survey dataset from Bangladesh is used together with census data. The production function estimates indicate that part of the salutary effects of parental education on child health require that the child actually be exposed to the educated parent. Given the demographic makeup of the study sample and the assumption that age education and gender completely account for productivity, teenage brothers and fathers would have the highest marginal productivity for child health and mothers and grandmothers the least. If economic opportunity draws mothers away from childcare, the presence of other household members with higher schooling levels offers the potential for an improvement in the overall quality of childcare time. In the present study the households failed to set the marginal labour product of child health for each of the caregivers equal. Thus, the quality of childcare may not be the household's sole concern in determining time allocation.

Date: 1996
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-1050(199609)5:53.0.CO;2-W

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:wly:hlthec:v:5:y:1996:i:5:p:383-407

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones

More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().