Effects of Mother's Home Time on Children's Schooling
用更直接的母亲育儿时间数据，发现高学历母亲的育儿时间能显著提高子女受教育年限，而低学历母亲则无此效果。
In order to determine the importance of parental timne inputs in the intergenerational transmission of socioeco- nomic status, previous work relies on proxies such as family size, birth order, maternal employment, and retrospective re- ports of child care time. This paper is unique in finding a connection between more direct measures of mother's child care time and children's outcomes as adults. It shows that (1) higher home productivity increases but higher opportunity costs reduce maternal child care time and (2) greater child care time of highly educ'ated but not of less well-educated mothers significantly raises children's years of schooling. M sOST of the analyses to uncover the mecha- nisms behind the positive correlation be- tween parents' socioeconomic status and the num- ber of years of education that children attain focus on time and energy parents devote to their children. In general, however, these analyses have relied on relatively poor proxies for parental time inputs including family size, birth order, and maternal employment. Since the quantity and qual- ity of parental time inputs may vary considerably holding constant such characteristics, these analyses may fail to provide a complete picture of the impact of parental time inputs. The purpose of this paper is to determine the effect of maternal child care time on offspring years of schooling. It supplements the usual data on siblings, birth order, and maternal employment with more direct estimates of mother's child care time. These estimates are based on actual mater- nal time use in household activities during the child's upbringing. This paper is unique in finding a connection between such direct measures of maternal child care time and children's outcomes as adults. It also provides evidence of systematic differences in the quantity and quality of time inputs between families. The remainder of the paper is divided into three sections. Section II reviews past work aimed at analyzing parental time inputs. Section III describes the data used here and presents the empirical results. Section IV lists the conclusions.