School Choice Maternal Employment and Child Achievement

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This study will analyze the interactions and interdependencies between school inputs and parental inputs as determinants of a child's educational achievement. This study considers two important dimensions of school and parental input decisions: the parents' choice of which school attendance area to live in, and the mother's decision to work, as a proxy for maternal time directly devoted to child education. A behavioral model of residential location and maternal employment decisions and their effects on child outcomes is developed. Using unique, longitudinal, mother-child data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth matched with detailed data on all U.S. schools, we estimate the parameters of the theoretical model. Estimates of the preference and production function parameters will make it possible to provide a detailed characterization of the mechanisms through which school inputs and maternal employment decisions affect children, and the effects of policy on migration, female employment and child outcomes. Understanding the mechanisms through which school quality and parental behaviors affect children's development is important for science, and for policy makers and parents in making decisions about the allocation of resources to children. Existing studies typically analyze the importance of school characteristics and parental inputs such as maternal employment in isolation. As both types of inputs are unlikely to be determined independently from each other, the omission of inputs from an educational production function specification is likely to result in endogeneity biases. This suggests a potentially important reason for the great variability in estimates found in the literature. This research project should help to resolve many of the conflicting estimates of the importance of parental behaviors and school inputs on child achievement.