Actors in the Child Development Process

Abstract

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Togetherness in the Household

“…Using Danish data on both types of leisure and a flexible parametric specification for utility, they find little substitution in practice. Unlike Browning, Donni, and Gørtz (2021), we consider various dimensions of togetherness: between two spouses (joint leisure), between parent and child (private childcare), and between both parents and child (joint childcare, as in Del Boca et al 2019). Moreover, we admit that togetherness requires synchronization of schedules, and we explicitly model this.…”

“…Cano, Perales, and Baxter (2019) and Le Forner (2021) study the impact of joint parental time on children's cognitive and noncognitive skills; in both papers joint time is paramount for children's verbal skills and communication. 7 Del Boca et al (2019) estimate a production function for child development and find that joint childcare is more productive than each parent's private childcare after age five and more productive than the sum of parents' private times after age nine. Joint care can also be beneficial to parents, as it is associated with higher parental well-being (Flood, Meier, and Musick 2020) and better performance in parental tasks (Stueve and Pleck 2001).…”

Borrowing Constraints and the Dynamics of Return and Repeat Migration

“…To identify parameters governing transitions in family status (p f + , p f − ), legal status (p d+ , p d− ) and employment (λ w , λ nw ), I match coefficients from OLS regressions of observed transitions in these outcomes on state variables that determine them. Note that due to endogenous selection into locations, and thus either Mexican or U.S. samples, all parameters, including those listed above, need to be estimated jointly within the model (similar, e.g., to Del Boca et al, 2019). Parameters of the earnings function are identified through regressions of log earnings in Mexico and the U.S. on arguments of f (•).…”

Productivity Versus Motivation in Adolescent Human Capital Production: Evidence from a Structurally-Motivated Field Experiment

“…A comparison to other empirical work on childhood skill development is informative for understanding the contribution of our framework and methods. A branch of this literature focuses on parental investment in child human capital and/or policy interventions such as financial resources or incentives for parents; e.g., Cunha, Heckman, and Schennach (2010) Del Boca, Flinn, and Wiswall (2014), Fryer, Levitt, and List (2015), Chetty, Hendren, and Katz (2016), Del Boca et al (2019), Agostinelli and Wiswall (2022), Gayle, Golan, and Soytas (2022). Another branch of the literature focuses on the importance of schooling-input quality/quantity; e.g., Hanushek (2020), Dobbie and Fryer (2011), Cullen, Levitt, Robertson, and Sadoff (2013), Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff (2014), Fryer (2017), Guryan et al (2021), Ahn, Aucejo, and James (2022), Fryer, Levitt, List, and Sadoff (2022), Luccioni (2023)).…”

“…Perhaps the most closely related papers to ours areAgostinelli and Wiswall (2022), which uses NLSY data with observations at two-year intervals, and DelBoca, Flinn, Verriest, and Wiswall (2019), which uses PSID data including child time-use variables. Unfortunately, neither of these datasets (or any others we know of) includes time-use data and exogenous incentive variation, the two features needed to directly quantify children's labor-supply elasticities 2.…”