Maternal Education, Home Environments and the Development of Children and Adolescents

By C. Meghir, Pedro Carneiro, M. Parey. 2007

602 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the intergenerational effects of maternal education on children's cognitive achievement, behavioural problems, grade repetition and obesity. We address endogeneity of maternal schooling by instrumenting with variation in schooling costs when the mother grew up. Using matched data from the female participants of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and their children, we can control for mother's ability and family background factors. Our results show substantial intergenerational returns to education. For children aged 7-8, for example, our IV results indicate that an additional year of mother's schooling increases the child's performance on a standardized math test by almost 0.1 of a standard deviation, and reduces the incidence of behavioural problems. Our data set allows us to study a large array of channels, which may transmit the effect of maternal education to the child, including family environment and parental investments at different ages of the child. We find that income effects, delayed childbearing, and assortative mating are likely to be important, and we show that maternal education leads to substantial differences in maternal labour supply. We investigate heterogeneity in returns, and we present results focusing both on very early stages in the child's life as well as adolescent outcomes. We present a falsification exercise to support the validity of our instruments, and our results are found to be robust in a sensitivity analysis. We discuss policy implications and relate our findings to intergenerational mobility.

Subfields: Education, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e9c562fbe113a1cb0f672610a34d076d62d21a40

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Citations in the corpus

Recent Developments in Intergenerational Mobility (2010, positive): “Carneiro, Meghir, and Parey (2007) use the NLSY79 and variation in maternal education induced by variation in schooling costs at the time the mother was growing up to identify the effect of maternal education on a variety of children’s outcomes, including behavioral problems, achievement, grade…”
Childhood Circumstances and Adult Outcomes: Act II (2018, neutral): “Carneiro et al. (2012) also focus on college education and instrument for education using variables such as tuition and distance to college.”
Influence of family socioeconomic status on IQ, language, memory and executive functions of Brazilian children (2016, background): “…mothers are more likely to have better educated husbands, higher income, they are more likely to invest in books, special lessons and materials (like computers) for their children and those things could explain the maternal education impact in children cognitive development (Carneiro et al. 2013).”
Parental Beliefs About Returns to Educational Investments - The Later the Better? (2015, neutral): “, Cunha, Heckman and Schennach 2010, Del Boca, Flinn and Wiswall 2014, Attanasio, Meghir and Nix 2015, Carneiro et al. 2015), more research will be needed on which parental investments are most effective in a given time period and how to optimally allocate resources over time. Second, the results ra”
Associations between EEG trajectories, family income, and cognitive abilities over the first two years of life (2023, background): “This was surprising as maternal education is one of the strongest facets of SES related to developmental outcomes (Carneiro et al., 2013).”