Child Endowment Research Articles

The Effect of Child Endowment on Fertility Choices

The Effect of Child Endowment on Fertility Choices

The bilingual gap in children's language, emotional, and pro-social development

Abstract In this paper we examine whether – conditional on other child endowments and family inputs – bilingual children achieve different language, emotional, and pro-social developmental outcomes. Our data, which allow us to analyze children's development in a dynamic framework, are extracted from the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). We model the development production functions for bilingual children using cumulative value-added specifications, which account for parental investments and children's own ability. Analysis based on child age confirms that bilingual children initially have worse language skills than their monolingual peers. The commencement of schooling appears to attenuate these differences, and by age seven, bilingual children have a developmental advantage. We find evidence of a positive relationship between bilingualism and some aspects of emotional development, and it is mainly boys who appear to benefit from their bilingual background.

Same Environment, Stratified Impacts? Air Pollution, Extreme Temperatures, and Birth Weight in Southeast China

Ambient air pollution and extreme temperatures have been associated in a number of settings with adverse birth outcomes. However, some newborns may be more vulnerable than others due to inequalities in at least two dimensions of their endowments. First, the pathway from ambient conditions to adverse birth outcomes may vary due to inequalities in child endowments related to socioeconomic status such as maternal education. For example, children in utero with less-educated mothers may be more vulnerable than those of more-educated mothers if their mothers have less access to living, work, transportation, and leisure spaces with indoor air filtration and temperature regulation, or if they have less knowledge of or resources for mitigation strategies. Second, babies' unequal underlying innate health endowments may relate to unequal outcomes in the same environmental context. Protective effects of maternal education may be more pronounced for the most physically vulnerable babies. These effects of unequal endowments may be particularly large in environments with greater air pollution. We examine, for the first time to our knowledge, the effects of these two dimensions of endowment inequalities on birth outcomes in a fairly polluted environment. We use unusual data that permits linking 54,828 singleton live birth records from a district in Guangzhou, China, a relatively polluted environment, to ambient air pollution (PM10 and a composite measure) and extreme temperature data, we test whether, overall, maternal education is an modifier in the relationships between ambient air pollution, extreme temperature, and birth weights. Via conditional quantile regressions, we then test for effect heterogeneity according to the underlying innate physical vulnerability of babies--those further to the left in the conditional distribution of birth weight--after conditioning on other confounders. Results show that the protection associated with a college-educated mother with respect to pollution and extreme heat is substantial: up to 0.31 standard deviations of birth weight. Importantly, this protection is amplified under more extreme ambient conditions and for physically innately more vulnerable infants, after conditioning on other confounders.

The shifting significance of child endowment records at the National Archives of Australia

The records in the collection of National Archives of Australia (NAA) relating to child endowment payments demonstrate how the status and significance of records are transformed by changing social and political climates. These records provide an example of the processes at play when records enter the pluralised, fourth dimension of the Records Continuum, and take on new value and meaning for different communities. This article argues that advocacy by the people whose lives are documented in records plays a crucial role in the transformation of the meaning and purposes of records, and has been an impetus for change in archival processes and practices in Australia. In this case, Care Leavers have harnessed the history of the Commonwealth paying child endowment to children’s institutions around Australia to argue successfully that the Australian government undeniably facilitated the institutional child welfare system and thus has a moral duty to help remedy the wrongs inflicted on so many in these institutions. The author argues that NAA has greatly improved the accessibility of its child endowment records, but radical transformation is required for these records to be truly reclaimed by Care Leavers.

The effects of a nutrient supplementation intervention in Ghana on parents' investments in their children.

A child’s endowment is a reflection of his/her genetic makeup and the conditions faced in early life. Parents build on their child’s endowment by investing resources in their child, and together, a child’s endowment and subsequent investments act as input into important later-life outcomes. A positive or negative shock to a child’s endowment can have a direct biological effect on a child’s long-term outcomes but may also affect parents’ decisions about investments in the health and human capital of their children. Using follow-up data collected several years after a randomized trial in Ghana, we explored whether maternal and child supplementation with small-quantity lipid-based nutrient supplements (SQ-LNS) throughout much of the first 1,000 days influenced parental investments in the health and human capital of their children. Across the domains of family planning, breastfeeding, health, education, and paternal financial support, we found that, in general, the intervention did not affect investments in the treated child nor his/her untreated siblings. These results suggest that given production technologies, constraints, and preferences, the intervention either did not change parents’ optimal investment strategies or that the effects of the intervention, namely increased birth size and attained length at 18 months of age, were too small for parents to perceive or to have any meaningful impact on parents’ expectations about the returns to investments in their children.

Inequalities in infant malnutrition between rural and urban areas in Cameroon: a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition

Child malnutrition is an obstacle to human capital and a deprivation of capabilities. In Cameroon, malnutrition is a public health problem and rural areas suffer more from child malnutrition than the urban areas. The objective of this study is to identify the factors that explain inequality in the distribution of child malnutrition between urban and rural areas in Cameroon. The methodology used is based on the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. The data used is from the Demographic and Health Survey organized in 2011 by the National Institute of Statistics. Differences in endowments of children and mothers explain 75% of the weight difference of children under 5 years between urban and rural areas. We specifically find that a paid job for the mother reduces by approximately 2.56 % the differences in the weights of children of less than 5 years between urban and rural areas. Also, the education of the mother reduces the difference in weight between the rural and urban children by 2.44% for primary education, 5.48% for secondary education and 3.54% for higher education. Lastly, the difference in weight between the children of rural and urban areas increases when the households are poor. The reduction inequalities of child malnutrition between urban and rural areas in Cameroon thus passes through the improvement of the education of the mother, the strengthening of the economic capacities of women in rural areas and the improvement of the living conditions of rural households. Keywords: infant malnutrition, inequality, Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition

Whoever Has Will Be Given More: Child Endowment and Human Capital Investment

Using a unique longitudinal survey from Ethiopia, we investigate whether resource constrained parents reinforce or attenuate differences in early abilities between their children. We propose a simple model that allows for sibling interactions. To overcome the endogeneity associated with measures of the endowment, we construct a measure of human capital at birth that is plausibly net of prenatal investment. We estimate a sibling fixed-effect model to account for bias due to unobserved family-specific heterogeneity. We find that parents reinforce educational inequality: inherently healthy children are more likely to attend preschool, be enrolled in elementary school, and have more expenses incurred towards their education. Health inputs are allocated in a compensatory manner.

The Effect of School Spending on Student Achievement: Addressing Biases in Value-Added Models

SummaryThe estimation of education production models used to evaluate the effect of school inputs and past skills on test scores, often called value-added models, can be biased by three main econometric issues: unobserved child characteristics, unobserved family and school characteristics and measurement error. We propose a two-step estimation technique which exploits the availability of test scores across time, subjects, families and schools in a unique administrative data set for England to correct for these potential biases. Our empirical results suggest that omitting school characteristics biases the estimation of the effect of school expenditure, whereas omitting unobserved child endowment biases the estimation of the effect of past skills but not the effect of school expenditure.

Child endowments and parental investments: Intra‐household allocation in oportunidades families in Mexico

AbstractThis paper estimates a family fixed‐effects model to test whether parental educational investments are reinforcing or compensating differences in child height and body mass index (BMI) within Oportunidades households. The results indicate that allocations are not made in response to endowment differences in isolation, but depend on the interaction of child endowment, gender, and beneficiary status. Moreover, investments are made so as to counterbalance efficiency and equity considerations: widening differences in height but closing gaps in BMI, where both strategies maximize returns given the earnings–endowment function for height and BMI in Mexico. Finally, household socio‐economic status matters. Thus, discriminatory responses within the better‐off urban beneficiary households are smaller. In contrast, indigenous beneficiary households, which have the lowest average endowment z‐scores and fraction spent on education, see the largest differences in educational outlay between child subgroups. While the economic effects seem small, these are measured relative to the mean of the base category. In some cases, then, parents are dedicating nearly a quarter of all expenditures to education for a standard deviation increase in endowment over mean sibling endowment. Hence, it seems that the success of the Oportunidades program in improving overall human capital formation may be masking rising inequalities within recipient households.

Childhood Circumstances and Adult Outcomes: Act II

That prenatal events can have life-long consequences is now well established. Nevertheless, research on the fetal origins hypothesis is flourishing and has expanded to include the early childhood (postnatal) environment. Why does this literature have a “second act?” We summarize the major themes and contributions driving the empirical literature since our 2011 reviews, and try to interpret the literature in light of an overarching conceptual framework about how human capital is produced early in life. One major finding is that relatively mild shocks in early life can have substantial negative impacts, but that the effects are often heterogeneous reflecting differences in child endowments, budget constraints, and production technologies. Moreover, shocks, investments, and interventions can interact in complex ways that are only beginning to be understood. Many advances in our knowledge are due to increasing accessibility of comprehensive administrative data that allow events in early life to be linked to long-term outcomes. Yet, we still know relatively little about the interval between, and thus about whether it would be feasible to identify and intervene with affected individuals at some point between early life and adulthood. We do know enough, however, to be able to identify some interventions that hold promise for improving child outcomes in early life and throughout the life course. (JEL I12, J13, J16, Q51, Q53)

Compensation or Reinforcement? The Stratification of Parental Responses to Children’s Early Ability

Theory and empirical evidence suggest that parents allocate their investments unequally among their children, thus inducing within-family inequality. We investigate whether parents reinforce or compensate for initial ability differences between their children as well as whether these parental responses vary by family socioeconomic status (SES). Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) and a twin fixed-effects approach to address unobserved heterogeneity, we find that parental responses to early ability differences between their children do vary by family SES. Contrary to prior findings, we find that advantaged parents provide more cognitive stimulation to higher-ability children, and lower-class parents do not respond to ability differences. No analogous stratification in parental responses to birth weight is found, suggesting that parents' responses vary across domains of child endowments. The reinforcing responses to early ability by high-SES parents do not, however, led to increases in ability differences among children because parental responses have little effect on children's later cognitive performance in this twin sample.

The Impact of Conditional Cash Transfers on the Amount and Type of Child Labor

This paper analyzes the impact of conditional cash transfers on the amount and type of child labor in poor households. It first develops a simple theoretical model where child labor and training are chosen to maximize inter-temporal household income, given constraints to social, household, and child endowments. Then, it conducts an empirical analysis using the randomized trial data collected to evaluate the 2006 Nicaragua conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. This social program transferred wealth to poor families in rural areas of the country conditional on children’s school attendance and health check-ups. One-third of the beneficiaries received, in addition, a wealth transfer to begin a non-agricultural business. The paper finds that the CCT program had a selective impact on the volume and quality of child labor, reducing it in the aggregate and steering it toward skill-forming activities. Specifically, the program appears to have reduced child labor for household chores and traditional farming while increasing it for non-traditional activities related to commerce and retail. These require the child to develop basic skills in reading and writing, arithmetic, and interpersonal relationships. Moreover, the paper finds that the source behind the increase in the better-quality type of child labor is not the basic component of the program but distinctively its business-grant intervention.

Australian State Income Taxation: A Historical Perspective

Contrasting with social insurance taxes and the key revenue raising role of VAT for northern European welfare states, Australia’s income tax has funded expansion of Australia’s social security system. The uniform income tax plan of 1942 unified Australia’s system of income taxes, and was central to funding the introduction of Australia’s unique social security system, establishing national child endowment, unemployment benefits and the widows’ pension in 1944.This article will describe the increasing reliance of Australian states on income taxation during the period 1915 to 1942, and the constraints arising from the increasing mobility of taxpayers and post-Federation economic integration; show how these states’ income tax policies responded to the economic shocks of the Depression which depleted the states’ revenues contemporaneously with increasing demands on governments to provide social protection; and identify how the concepts, design and administration of state income taxes were embedded in Australia’s national tax and social security systems established between 1942 and 1944.The design of Australia’s unified income tax system was not based on a clean slate, nor was it simply an expedient response to wartime revenue or macroeconomic management needs. In this article, it is shown to be based on an income tax template derived closely from Australian state income taxes during the interwar period, reconfigured by the economic shocks of the Depression years, and glued together by federal/state finance institutions and agreements which redistributed national revenues to less affluent jurisdictions. Income tax unification addressed the key barriers to funding adequate social protection that had confronted states during the Depression.

Генетичний прогноз рухової обдарованості дітей та підлітків: методологія вивчення та застосування у практиці одонтологічних маркерів

Purpose: to study methodological bases of use of odontological markers and determination of expediency to use them in sports genetics (with prognosis of motor endowments of children and youth). Material and Methods: 25 men and 25 women at the age of 20–30 years old took part in investigation. Methods of theoretical analysis and practical methods of receiving the imprint of teeth and analysis of odontological signs. Results: it was found the methodology of analysis of odontological sings and compared odontoglyphics in men and women and in people predisposed to physical development. Conclusions: there are differences in patterns of teeth in people of both sexes and different physical development.

Child Endowments and Parental Investments: Intra-Household Allocation in Oportunidades Families in Mexico

This paper estimates a family fixed‐effects model to test whether parental educational investments are reinforcing or compensating differences in child height and body mass index (BMI) within Oportunidades households. The results indicate that allocations are not made in response to endowment differences in isolation, but depend on the interaction of child endowment, gender, and beneficiary status. Moreover, investments are made so as to counterbalance efficiency and equity considerations: widening differences in height but closing gaps in BMI, where both strategies maximize returns given the earnings–endowment function for height and BMI in Mexico. Finally, household socio‐economic status matters. Thus, discriminatory responses within the better‐off urban beneficiary households are smaller. In contrast, indigenous beneficiary households, which have the lowest average endowment z‐scores and fraction spent on education, see the largest differences in educational outlay between child subgroups. While the economic effects seem small, these are measured relative to the mean of the base category. In some cases, then, parents are dedicating nearly a quarter of all expenditures to education for a standard deviation increase in endowment over mean sibling endowment. Hence, it seems that the success of the Oportunidades program in improving overall human capital formation may be masking rising inequalities within recipient households.

Endowments and parental investments in infancy and early childhood.

This article tests whether parents reinforce or compensate for child endowments. We estimate how the difference in birth weight across siblings impacts specific parental investments: breast-feeding, well-baby visits, immunizations, and preschool attendance. Our results indicate that normal-birthweight children are 5%-11% more likely to receive early childhood parental investments than their low-birth-weight siblings. Moreover, the presence of additional low-birth-weight siblings in the household increases the likelihood of investments such as well-baby visits and immunizations for normal-birth-weight children. These results suggest that parental investments in early childhood tend to reinforce endowment differences.

Interactions with Low Wages: The Australian Approach to Work Benefits

It is not always well understood that Australia has a comprehensive set of social security arrangements with the potential to significantly supplement low wages, especially for families with children. These provisions have evolved over a long period, beginning with the introduction of child endowment in the 19-10s. During the past twenty-five years, the coverage of income transfers as a supplement to earnings has been significantly expanded, such that it now provides support for partners as well as for children and, in some cases. for low-paid full-time workers themselves. The Australian approach differs in a number of ways from approaches typically taken in other countries. This paper outlines how the Australian system of wage supplementation has evolved over the last century. It charts the evolving relationships between the income support system and minimum wages and highlights the influence of key policy changes on those relationships and the consequent financial incentives to take low-paid work. In conclusion, the paper reports recent evidence from the OECD which finds that Australia and New Zealand are among a small group of countries that consistently provide higher relative incomes for low-wage earners than comparable arrangements in most other developed countries.

The Response of Household Parental Investment to Child Endowments

The theoretical and empirical literature on parental investment focuses on whether child-specific parental investments reinforce or compensate for a child's initial endowments. However, many parental investments, such as neighborhood quality and family size and structure, are shared wholly or in part among all children in a household. The empirical results of this paper imply that such household parental investments compensate for low endowments, as proxied by low birth weight.

The response of household parental investment to child endowments

The theoretical and empirical literature on parental investment focuses on whether child-specific parental investments reinforce or compensate for a child’s initial endowments. However, many parental investments, such as neighborhood quality and family size and structure, are shared wholly or in part among all children in a household. The empirical results of this paper imply that such household parental investments compensate for low endowments, as proxied by low birth weight.

Intrafamily Resource Allocations: A Dynamic Model of Birth Weight

This paper estimates a model of dynamic intrahousehold investment behavior which incorporates family fixed effects and child endowment heterogeneity. This framework is applied to large American and British survey data on birth outcomes, with focus on the effects of antenatal parental smoking and maternal labor supply net of other maternal behavior and child characteristics. We find that maternal smoking during pregnancy reduces birth weight and fetal growth, while paternal smoking has virtually no effect. Mothers' work interruptions of up to two months before birth have a positive effect on birth outcomes, especially among British children. Parental behavior appears to respond to permanent family-specific unobservables and to child idiosyncratic endowments in a way that suggests that parents have equal concerns, rather than efficiency motives, in allocating their prenatal inputs across children. Evidence of equal concerns emerges also from the analysis of breastfeeding decisions, although the effects in this case are weaker.