Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/185067 
Year of Publication: 
2018
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 11607
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
The importance of non-cognitive skills in determining long-term human capital and labor market outcomes is widely acknowledged, but relatively little is known about how educational investments by parents may respond to children’s non-cognitive characteristics. This paper evaluates the parental response to non-cognitive variation across siblings in rural Gansu province, China, employing a household fixed effects specification; the non-cognitive measures of interest are defined as the inverse of both externalizing challenges (behavioral problems and aggression) and internalizing challenges (anxiety and withdrawal). The results suggest that there is significant heterogeneity with respect to maternal education. More educated mothers appear to compensate for differences between their children, investing more in a child who exhibits greater non-cognitive deficits, while less educated mothers reinforce these differences. Most importantly, there is evidence that these compensatory investments are associated with the narrowing of non-cognitive deficits over time for children of more educated mothers, while there is no comparable pattern in households with less educated mothers.
Subjects: 
non-cognitive characteristics
parental investment
intrahousehold allocation
JEL: 
I24
O15
D13
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
567.61 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.