Is Maternal Employment Related to Childhood Obesity in China?: Evidence from the China Health and Nutrition Survey
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The prevalence of childhood obesity in China has been increasing over the past few decades. In this paper, we investigate the causal relationship between maternal employment and children’s weight status in China. We use the matched mother-child data from China Health and Nutrition Survey from 1991 to 2009 and employ various econometric techniques to control for observable and unobservable heterogeneity that affect the relationship between children’s weight and mothers’ work. The estimation results on the probability of a child being overweight/obese shows that maternal employment has a significantly negative effect on the likelihood of childhood overweight/obesity for the full sample and rural children, but not for the urban children. Moreover, for the 1990s group, the impact of maternal employment is not statistically significant, but for the 2000s group, it does. This result is contradictory to most of the findings from developed countries. Unlike developed countries, the maternal employment might have different relationship with the potential pathway variables (e.g. sedentary activities, physical activities). This study may lay the groundwork for the causal relationship between maternal employment and child’s weight in China. Further work is needed to understand the mechanisms through which maternal work affects children’s weight.
RPRT
Agricultural & Applied Economics Association’s Meeting
Xie, Ruizhi
Awokuse, Titus O.
2014
Minneapolis, MN
2175