Working Paper: NBER ID: w13993
Authors: Jonathan Guryan; Erik Hurst; Melissa Schettini Kearney
Abstract: Parents invest both their material resources and their time into raising their children. Time investment in children is thought to be critical to the development of "quality" children who will become productive adults. This paper has three goals related to the examination of parental time allocated to the care of their children. First, using data from the recent American Time Use Surveys (ATUS), we highlight what we think are the most interesting, and perhaps surprising, cross sectional patterns in time spent with children by parents within the United States. Second, we interpret our results in a Beckerian framework of time allocation with a view toward establishing whether parental childcare appears to be more akin to leisure or home production. Third, we examine data from a sample of 14 countries to establish whether the patterns we observe in the United States hold across countries and within other countries. We show that both within countries and across countries there is a strong positive relationship between parental education, or earnings, and time spent with children. We then show that time spent with children does not follow patterns typical of leisure or home production, suggesting an important difference. We speculate that one reason for this positive education gradient relates to the investment aspect of time spent with children.
Keywords: No keywords provided
JEL Codes: J13; J22
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Parental Education (I24) | Time Spent with Children (J12) |
| Parental Income (D31) | Time Spent with Children (J12) |
| Parental Education (I24) | Parental Investment in Child Care (J13) |
| Parental Income (D31) | Parental Investment in Child Care (J13) |
| Time Spent with Children (J12) | Child Development (J13) |