Parental Employment and Child Cognitive Development

Christopher Ruhm

No 7666, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This study investigates the relationship between parental employment and child cognitive development using data from multiple years of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Maternal labor supply during the first three years of the child's life is predicted to have a small negative effect on the verbal ability of 3 and 4 year olds and a substantial detrimental impact on the reading and math achievement of 5 and 6 year olds. Working during the second and third years appears to have less favorable or more deleterious consequences when the mother is also employed in the first year. The results are robust to the inclusion of controls for day care arrangements or paternal job-holding and there is some indication that early employment may be particularly costly for children in traditional' two-parent families. Finally, the data suggest that paternal and maternal employment have qualitatively similar effects, hinting at the importance of time investments by fathers. The overall conclusion is that previous research may have provided an overly optimistic assessment of the effects of parental employment on child cognitive development.

JEL-codes: I12 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
Note: CH EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (61)

Published as Christopher J. Ruhm, 2004. "Parental Employment and Child Cognitive Development," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 39(1).

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7666.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:7666

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7666

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().