Parental Work Hours and Childhood Obesity: Evidence Using Instrumental Variables Related to Sibling School Eligibility

Charles Courtemanche, Rusty Tchernis and Xilin Zhou ()
Additional contact information
Xilin Zhou: Georgia State University

No 10739, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This study exploits plausibly exogenous variation from the youngest sibling's school eligibility to estimate the effects of parental work on the weight outcomes of older children in the household. Data come from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth linked to the Child and Young Adult Supplement. We first show that mothers' work hours increase gradually as the age of the youngest child rises, whereas mothers' spouses' work hours exhibit a discontinuous jump at kindergarten eligibility. Leveraging these insights, we develop an instrumental variables model that shows that parents' work hours lead to larger increases in children's BMI z-scores and probabilities of being overweight and obese than those identified in previous studies. We find no evidence that the impacts of maternal and paternal work are different. Subsample analyses find that the effects are concentrated among advantaged households, as measured by an index involving education, race, and mother's marital status.

Keywords: women's labor supply; maternal employment; childhood obesity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2017-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-edu, nep-hea and nep-lma
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published - published as 'Maternal Work Hours and Childhood Obesity: Evidence Using Instrumental Variables Related to Sibling School Eligibility' in: Journal of Human Capital, 2019, 13 (4), 553 - 584

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Related works:
Working Paper: Parental Work Hours and Childhood Obesity: Evidence Using Instrumental Variables Related to Sibling School Eligibility (2017)
Working Paper: Parental Work Hours and Childhood Obesity: Evidence using Instrumental Variables Related to Sibling School Eligibility (2017)
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