Faculty
Social Sciences
Supervisor Name
Audra Bowlus
Keywords
child development, skill formation, instrumental variable estimation, early test scores, cognitive achievement, locus of control, parental investment
Description
Little exploration has been done to determine the impact of family structure on parental investment decisions and how gaps in children’s cognitive achievement are affected in turn. To examine the role of family structure, this paper estimates the production function for children’s cognitive achievement using a value-added specification with instrumental variables estimation. A novel feature of this research is that variation in family structure and maternal locus of control are exploited in an effort to account for the endogeneity of parental investment and children’s cognitive performance. Applying my methodology to data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the corresponding Child/Young Adult survey from 1988 to 2004, I find that family structure has a substantial impact on parental investment. The impact of maternal locus of control on parental investment is modest, except for separated/divorced mothers living with new partners. Gaps in parental investment due to family structure and maternal locus of control consequently contribute to reading achievement gaps, but the same conclusion cannot be made for math achievement. I additionally find that ordinary least squares estimates are biased downward due to the failure to account for feedback effects between investment and achievement, but the differences with instrumental variables estimates are not as pronounced as expected.
Acknowledgements
I would like to extend thanks to Dr. Audra Bowlus, the Western USRI program, and the department of economics at Western for providing me with the opportunity to complete this research and for their support throughout the program.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Document Type
Paper
Included in
Child Cognitive Achievement Gaps: The Role of Family Structure and Maternal Locus of Control in Parental Investment
Little exploration has been done to determine the impact of family structure on parental investment decisions and how gaps in children’s cognitive achievement are affected in turn. To examine the role of family structure, this paper estimates the production function for children’s cognitive achievement using a value-added specification with instrumental variables estimation. A novel feature of this research is that variation in family structure and maternal locus of control are exploited in an effort to account for the endogeneity of parental investment and children’s cognitive performance. Applying my methodology to data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the corresponding Child/Young Adult survey from 1988 to 2004, I find that family structure has a substantial impact on parental investment. The impact of maternal locus of control on parental investment is modest, except for separated/divorced mothers living with new partners. Gaps in parental investment due to family structure and maternal locus of control consequently contribute to reading achievement gaps, but the same conclusion cannot be made for math achievement. I additionally find that ordinary least squares estimates are biased downward due to the failure to account for feedback effects between investment and achievement, but the differences with instrumental variables estimates are not as pronounced as expected.