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Title: Heterogeneous Father Time Spent and Inequality of Child Development in Health and Cognition

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2023

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Abstract: The literature on child development has a strong focus on maternal time use, female labour supply and child outcomes. This paper first highlights that fathers with higher labour supply also spend significantly more time at home with their children, while unemployed fathers spend the least time with their children. The positive association between labour supply and parenting time exists only for fathers, but not for mothers. To quantify the contribution of the heterogeneity in fathers' time investment to the inequality in child development, this paper estimates production functions for cognitive and health development for children aged 1-18 with the father's time input and the mother's time input using the PSID time diary. The estimation is based on a nonlin-ear latent factor model with local gender-specific labour demand shocks as instruments with a control function approach. Counterfactual analysis to remove father heterogene-ity in time investment reduces 22 per cent of the variance in child cognition and 49 per cent of the variance in child health explained by the model among children aged 12-18.

Url: https://www.ecineq.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/EcineqAMSE-141.pdf

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Authors: Li, Jiaqi; Zhong, Yaolang

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Data Collections: IPUMS CPS

Topics: Family and Marriage, Population Health and Health Systems, Work, Family, and Time

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