Do high-income households 'label' family cash benefits? Evidence on family expenditures from Australia.

This study examines family expenditures and how they respond to the provision of family cash transfers, particularly among higher-income families. Naming cash benefits with explicit reference to 'families' or 'children' can nudge households into labelling the extra cash for financial investments in children. Labelling has mainly been assessed among lower-income families. Yet if also higher-income families engage in labelling, there could be unintended consequences on the often stark disparities in child-related investments across the socio-economic divide. Drawing on 2006-2019 data from Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA), the study relies on reforms to Australia's Family Tax Benefit to 'reveal' expenditure responses among higher-income families via an instrumented difference-in-differences design. Higher-income households seem to earmark a family cash transfer for children's clothing but not for children's education fees, while they also assign money to adult clothing. Lower-income households, differently, seem to engage in more clear-cut, child-oriented labelling, at the expense of adult-assignable goods. Family cash transfers can nudge households into spending more money on their children across the socioeconomic divide, but not necessarily homogeneously so. Providing more well-off families with modest transfers might thus have limited perverse effects on inequality in family expenditures.

Labour Market Shocks and Parental Investments during the Covid-19 Pandemic.

This paper studies spill-over effects of parental labour market shocks at two time points in the Covid-19 crisis: right after its onset in April 2020, and in January 2021. We use rich data from the UK to look at the consequences of immediate and persistent shocks that hit parents' economic livelihoods. These negative labour market shocks have substantially larger impacts when suffered by fathers than by mothers. Children of fathers that suffered the most severe shocks - earnings dropping to zero - are the ones that are consistently impacted. In April 2020, they were 10 percentage points less likely to have received additional paid learning resources, but their fathers were spending about 30 more minutes per day helping them with school work. However, by January 2021, this latter association switches sign, as the negative spill-over onto children's education occurred for those fathers facing more persistent, negative labour market shocks as the crisis progressed. The paper discusses potential mechanisms driving these results, finding a sustained deterioration of household finances and a worsening of father's mental health to be factors at play.

Financially Overextended: College Attendance as a Contributor to Foreclosures During the Great Recession.

Although subprime mortgage lending and unemployment were largely responsible for the wave of foreclosures during the Great Recession, additional sources of financial risk may have exacerbated the crisis. We hypothesize that many parents sending children to college were financially overextended and vulnerable to foreclosure as the economy contracted. With commuting zone panel data from 2006 to 2011, we show that increasing rates of college attendance across the income distribution in one year predict a foreclosure rate increase in subsequent years, net of fixed characteristics and changes in employment, refinance debt, house prices, and 19-year-old population size. We find similar evidence of college-related foreclosure risk using longitudinal household data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Our findings uncover a previously overlooked dimension of the foreclosure crisis, and highlight mortgage insecurity as an inadvertent consequence of parental investment in higher education.

Unplanned pregnancy and the impact on sibling health outcomes.

This work considers whether planning matters with respect to the effect of a new sibling on another siblings' health. Objective health outcomes are observed before and after a new addition to the family. To date, the literature on family size has focused on a quality-quantity trade-off; the more children in a family, the less resources devoted to each child. We present a theoretical framework which highlights that the quantity-quality trade-off may only be relevant in the case of an unplanned sibling. We also suggest that a planned sibling may result in health gains for the other children. We use two waves of data for more than 1800 children from Peru from the Young Lives Project to test our hypothesis. The data relate to the children at 1 and 5 years. For health outcomes, height for age and weight for age Z are considered. The results highlight significant negative independent effects on height for age when an unplanned sibling is added to the household. In addition, we find positive sibling effects on height for age when a planned sibling arrives. We find only small planning effects for weight for age. We view our hypothesis as a pathway that can further explain the quantity-quality trade-off.

Paid family leave and parental investments in infant health: Evidence from California.

This paper evaluates the effect of Paid Family Leave (PFL) on breastfeeding and immunizations- two critical parental investments in infant health - which we identify using California's 2004 PFL policy that ensured mothers up to six weeks of leave at a 55% wage replacement rate. We employ difference-in-difference and difference-in-difference-in-differences models for a large, representative sample of children (N = 314,532) born between 2000 and 2013 drawn from the restricted-use versions of the 2003-2014 National Immunization Surveys. Our most conservative estimates indicate that access to PFL is associated with at least a 15% increase in breastfeeding exclusively for at least six months. We find substantially large effects for disadvantaged mothers, adding to the existing evidence that access to state-sanctioned paid family leave might benefit children overall and disadvantaged children in particular.

The effects of an epidemic on prenatal investments, childhood mortality and health of surviving children.

The potential death toll from an epidemic is larger than the number of deaths directly associated with the infection. In this study, we find that prenatal exposure to a cholera epidemic in Peru increased childhood mortality and that surviving children were more likely to be underweight and to suffer from diarrhea. We further find that a significant part of this mortality happened during the first day of life, and that prenatal exposure to cholera decreased prenatal care and institutional deliveries, suggesting that the mortality and possibly other longer-term effects were partially driven by a reduction in prenatal investments.

Effects of parental health shocks on children's school achievements: A register-based population study.

This paper studies how a severe parental health shock affects children's school achievements using a rich longitudinal dataset of Danish children. We use coarsened exact matching to control for potential endogeneity between parental health and children's school outcomes and employ cancer specific survival rates to measure the size of the health shock. We find robust negative (albeit small) effects of a parental health shock on children's basic school grades as well as their likelihood of starting and finishing secondary education, especially for poor prognosis cancers. We observe different outcomes across children's gender and age and gender of the ill parent, but no effects of family-related resilience factors such as parental education level. The effects appear to be driven by non-pecuniary costs rather than by pecuniary costs. Moreover, we find that the negative effects on school performance increase in the size of the health shock for both survivors and non-survivors.

Paternity sharing in insects with female competition for nuptial gifts.

Male parental investment is expected to be associated with high confidence of paternity. Studies of species with exclusive male parental care have provided support for this hypothesis because mating typically co-occurs with each oviposition, allowing control over paternity and the allocation of care. However, in systems where males invest by feeding mates (typically arthropods), mating (and thus the investment) is separated from egg-laying, resulting in less control over insemination, as male ejaculates compete with rival sperm stored by females, and a greater risk of investing in unrelated offspring (cuckoldry). As strong selection on males to increase paternity would compromise the fitness of all a female's other mates that make costly nutrient contributions, paternity sharing (males not excluded from siring offspring) is an expected outcome of sperm competition. Using wild-caught females in an orthopteran and a dipteran species, in which sexually selected, ornamented females compete for male nuptial food gifts needed for successful reproduction, we examined paternity patterns and compared them with findings in other insects. We used microsatellite analysis of offspring (lifetime reproduction in the orthopteran) and stored sperm from wild-caught females in both study species. As predicted, there was evidence of shared paternity as few males failed to sire offspring. Further support for paternity sharing is the lack of last-male sperm precedence in our study species. Although paternity was not equal among sires, our estimates of paternity bias were similar to other insects with valuable nuptial gifts and contrasted with the finding that males are frequently excluded from siring offspring in species where males supply little more than sperm. This suggests paternity bias may be reduced in nuptial-gift systems and may help facilitate the evolution of these paternal investments.

A bit of salt, a trace of life: Gender norms and the impact of a salt iodization program on human capital formation of school aged children.

This paper evaluates the effect of a national salt iodization program on the cognition of school-aged children in China. We focus on the role of gender preferences. Linking pre-eradication iodine deficiency rates with household survey data, we find a strong positive impact of prenatal exposure to the program on cognition and schooling for girls. For boys, we find no effect. Child preferences play an important role in parental investment decisions and impact program effects. We find that parents invest more in girls with a high initial endowment. For boys, this is different. Parents invest in boys, irrespective of their initial endowment. The nationally implemented program may therefore primarily benefit low endowment girls. We then exploit village-level variation in gender attitudes and find that gender attitudes are related to parental investment behavior and that the program's impact is stronger for girls born to parents with strong preferences for boys.

Parenting Knowledge, Parental Investments, and Early Childhood Development in Rural Households in Western China.

This paper investigates the relationships between caregivers' parenting knowledge and early childhood development, based on a survey conducted in 1715 rural households in 100 villages located in an undeveloped rural area of western China. The results find that, first, caregivers' parenting knowledge is positively and significantly associated with children's development outcomes, including cognitive, language, motor, and social-emotional development; second, caregivers' parental investments significantly mediate the link between parenting knowledge and early childhood development; third, in contrast with other parental investments, play materials (in terms of variety and quantity) and play activities in the households are the strongest mediators. Our findings might be informative for policy makers to design policies targeted to foster human capital formation in rural China.

Mothers' Time, the Parenting Package, and Links to Healthy Child Development.

Studies consistently show that mothers' time in particular activities with children is positively associated with child well-being, but results are mixed regarding associations between child outcomes and the sheer amount of time that mothers spend with children. Using time diary and survey data from three waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement (N = 2,622), we assess whether gains from mothers' total time with children vary by the quality of mothers' other investments in children, or the "parenting package." Mother-child shared time was associated with children's broad reading scores and adolescents' externalizing behavior, but mothers' other parenting investments did not moderate these associations. Results were robust to alternative measures of mothers' time and to the incorporation of earlier assessments of child academic and behavior problems. Parenting investments may be indicative of the quality of children's home environments but do not magnify gains from mother-child shared time.

Missing Time with Parents: Son Preference among Asians in the United States.

We study prevalence of son preference in families of East and South Asian origin living in the U.S. by investigating parental time investments in children using American Time Use Surveys. Estimates show that East and South Asian mothers spend an additional hour of quality time per day with their young (aged 0-2 years) sons than with young daughters; son-preference in mothers' time allocation declines as children get older. East and South Asian fathers' time with young children is gender neutral. We find gender specialization in time with children aged 6-17 with fathers spending more time with sons and mothers spending more time with daughters.

HUMAN CAPITAL GROWTH AND POVERTY: EVIDENCE FROM ETHIOPIA AND PERU.

In this paper we use high quality data from two developing countries, Ethiopia and Peru, to estimate the production functions of human capital from age 1 to age 15. We characterize the nature of persistence and dynamic complementarities between two components of human capital: health and cognition. We also explore the implications of different functional form assumptions for the production functions. We find that more able and higher income parents invest more, particularly at younger ages when investments have the greatest impacts. These differences in investments by parental income lead to large gaps in inequality by age 8 that persist through age 15.

Orphanhood and fertility in young adults: Evidence from South Africa.

I study the relation between orphanhood and fertility patterns in young adults using a longitudinal survey from the city of Cape Town, South Africa. The data set combines two survey waves with a year-by-year life history calendar that records key outcomes (e.g., schooling, work, fertility). It also provides information on so-called 'parental investments' (time and material support), family background, and literacy and numeracy test scores. I find that orphans exhibit significantly higher rates of teenage pregnancy. In particular, teenage motherhood is 19% points more likely among (female) orphans. These results suggest that orphanhood may leave a long-lasting 'imprint' in terms of premature fertility, especially in teenage females.

Endowments at Birth and Parents' Investments in Children.

Do parents invest more in higher quality children, or do they compensate for lower quality by giving more to children with lower endowments? We answer this question in the context of a large-scale iodine supplementation programme in Tanzania. We find that children with higher programme exposure were more likely to receive necessary vaccines and were breastfed for longer. Siblings of treated children were also more likely to be immunised. Fertility behavior and investments at the time of birth were unaffected.

Care around birth, infant and mother health and maternal health investments - Evidence from a nurse strike.

Care around birth may impact child and mother health and parental health investments. We exploit the 2008 national strike among Danish nurses to identify the effects of care around birth on infant and mother health (proxied by health care usage) and maternal investments in the health of their newborns. We use administrative data from the population register on 39,810 Danish births in the years 2007-2010 and complementary survey and municipal administrative data on 8288 births in the years 2007-2009 in a differences-in-differences framework. We show that the strike reduced the number of mothers' prenatal midwife consultations, their length of hospital stay at birth, and the number of home visits by trained nurses after hospital discharge. We find that this reduction in care around birth increased the number of child and mother general practitioner (GP) contacts in the first month. As we do not find strong effects of strike exposure on infant and mother GP contacts in the longer run, this result suggests that parents substitute one type of care for another. While we lack power to identify the effects of care around birth on hospital readmissions and diagnoses, our results for maternal health investments indicate that strike-exposed mothers-especially those who lacked postnatal early home visits-are less likely to exclusively breastfeed their child at four months. Thus reduced care around birth may have persistent effects on treated children through its impact on parental investments.

Different tactics, one goal: initial reproductive investments of males and females in a small Arctic seabird.

Despite a great number of studies on extra-pair paternity in birds, the actual roles of males and females in extra-pair contacts is poorly understood, as detailed behavioural studies comparing the reproductive performance of the two sexes prior to egg laying are relatively scarce. Here, we investigated mating behaviour (copulations and aggressive interactions), time budget and body condition (size-adjusted body mass and baseline corticosterone level) in the little auk (Alle alle), a monogamous and highly colonial, Arctic seabird. We performed the study in a large breeding colony of the little auk in Hornsund (Spitsbergen). We found that the males frequently attempted extra-pair copulations (EPCs), although these contacts were almost always unsuccessful, mostly because of the females' rejection behaviour. These results clearly indicate that genetic monogamy is maintained through female control. Nevertheless, males tried to protect their paternity by staying in close proximity to their females and aggressively intervening when their mates became involved in EPCs. Compared to females, males also spent more time in the colony guarding nest sites. Despite the apparent sex differences in the time budget and frequency of aggressive interactions, body condition was similar in the two sexes, indicating comparable parental investments during the mating period.