Maternal Employment, Migration, and Child Development

Abstract

In this paper we analyze the roles and interrelationships between school inputs and parental inputs in affecting child outcomes in the U.S. We investigate the interactions among and endogeneity of these inputs in the production of child outcomes by specifying and estimating a behavioral model of parent's decisions that can affect these outcomes. We focus on two important dimensions of school and parental input decisions: the parents' choice of which school attendance area to live in, and the mother's decision to work as a proxy for maternal time directly devoted to child education. Parents receive utility from consumption, leisure, and the child's achievement and they maximize expected utility. In making location and employment decisions, parents take into account the distribution of impacts of these decisions on their child's educational development, modeled through a production function for child outcomes. The environment in which these decisions are made is characterized by uncertain future wages and job prospects for both parents, and uncertainty in the child's future educational outcomes. Besides school quality, residential location decisions are influenced by local labor market conditions, housing and moving costs and geographic preferences. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we integrate information on household migration, maternal employment decisions, and parental wage rates with observations on child outcomes over a 13-year period. Our statistical model follows directly from the theoretical framework. We relax many functional form assumptions that have been imposed by previous researchers who have studied how parents and schools can affect a child's development. Estimating the educational production function as part of a structural model provides significantly different estimates of the production process. The impacts of the school district characteristics diminish by factors of 2 to 4 after controlling for the fact that families may be choosing where to live because of the school district characteristics and labor market opportunities. We also find that the impacts on child outcomes of having moved and working full-time (as opposed to not working) to change signs and remain statistically significant after controlling for the possible endogeneity of these decisions. When we turn to the estimates of the overall effects of changes in characteristics on child outcomes, a somewhat different story emerges. Since parents can re-optimize by choosing different school districts and hours of work, many of the benefits to students from changing school district characteristics end up having only minor impacts on the child test scores.