Maternal Labor Supply and the Production of Child Health
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Few will dispute there is a relationship between mother's work and her children's health. However, very little can be definitively said about this relationship. The possibility of both positive and negative effects, as well as the potential for children's health to affect mother's work decisions, complicates reaching any easy conclusions. Our goal is to explore the work-child health relationship to understand how mother's work characteristics affect the health of their children. The China Health and Nutrition Survey provides detailed data at the individual-, household-, and community-levels. This allows us to estimate a child health production function, specifically controlling for characteristics of the mother's work. Mother's wage, work hours, work location, and whether she works are all hypothesized to affect child health, measured as height and weight. We also test whether household and community characteristics, such as paternal involvement and availability of childcare substitutes mitigate any negative effects. Additionally, we estimate reduced form demand functions for mother's work characteristics. We find that mother's work characteristics do affect child height, but have little effect on child weight. The most significant effects were work location and hours worked. Working near home has a positive effect on child height, while working more hours has a negative effect on child height. Conversely, we find mother's work decisions are influenced community by family and community characteristics. Overall, it seems clear mother's work choices do affect their children's health and these effects should be considered in formulating public policy (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
JOUR
Jessup, Amber Irene
2000
Dissertation Abstracts International, A: The Humanities and Social Sciences
60
08
3066-3066
04194209 0-599-45049-5
805