Mother's Time Allocation, Child Care and Child Cognitive Development

Ylenia Brilli

CHILD Working Papers Series from Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic Economics (CHILD) - CCA

Abstract: This paper analyzes the effects of maternal time allocation between work, child care and leisure, and non-parental child care on a child's cognitive development. By using data for the U.S. from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I estimate a behavioral model that takes into account the heterogeneity in the mother's child-care productivity induced by her level of education, and the diversity in the non-parental child care impact given by the different child care types available in the market. The results show that mothers with at least some college education are more effective than their low-educated counterpart in boosting the child's cognitive skills through their child-care time. Moreover, formal child care is found to be more productive than the informal one, especially during the child's first years of life. The simulation of policies aimed at regulating the non-parental child care market, so that only high-quality arrangements are available, shows that the effects on the child's cognitive outcome are larger for the children of low-educated mothers, who benefit more from replacing their mother's time with the alternative care provider's time.

Keywords: mother employment; mother time allocation; non-parental child care; child development; structural estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 59 pages
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-neu
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Mother’s Time Allocation, Child Care and Child Cognitive Development (2017)
Working Paper: Mother's Time Allocation, Child Care and Child Cognitive Development (2015)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cca:wchild:59

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