The Effect of Maternal Employment on Children's Academic Performance

Rachel Dunifon (), Anne Toft Hansen, Sean Nicholson and Lisbeth Nielsen

No 19364, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Using a Danish data set that follows 135,000 Danish children from birth through 9th grade, we examine the effect of maternal employment during a child's first three and first 15 years on that child's grade point average in 9th grade. We address the endogeneity of employment by including a rich set of household control variables, instrumenting for employment with the gender- and education-specific local unemployment rate, and by including maternal fixed effects. We find that maternal employment has a positive effect on children's academic performance in all specifications, particularly when women work part-time. This is in contrast with the larger literature on maternal employment, much of which takes place in other contexts, and which finds no or a small negative effect of maternal employment on children's cognitive development and academic performance.

JEL-codes: J13 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-edu
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

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