Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/32784 
Year of Publication: 
2010
Series/Report no.: 
ZEW Discussion Papers No. 10-028
Publisher: 
Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung (ZEW), Mannheim
Abstract: 
This paper examines the impact of parental investments on the development of cognitive, mental and emotional skills during childhood using data from a longitudinal study, the Mannheim Study of Children at Risk, starting at birth. Our work offers three important innovations. First, we use reliable measures of the child's cognitive, mental and emotional skills as well as accurate measures of parental investment. Second, we estimate latent factor models to account for unobserved characteristics of children. Third, we examine the skill development for girls and boys separately, as well as for children who were born with either organic or psychosocial risk. We find a decreasing impact of parental investments on cognitive and mental skills, while emotional skills seem to be unaffected by parental investment throughout childhood. Thus, initial inequality persists during childhood. Since families are the main sources of education during the first years of life, our results have important implications for the quality of the parent-child relationship.
Subjects: 
cognitive skills
noncognitive skills
critical and sensitive periods
self-productivity
inequality
organic risk
psychosocial risk
JEL: 
I12
I21
J13
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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