Parental education and parental time with children
By: Jonathan Guryan, Erik Hurst, Melissa Schettini Kearney.
Contributors: Hurst, Erik.; Kearney, Melissa Schettini, 1974-; National Bureau of Economic Research.
Series: NBER working paper series -- working paper 13993; Working paper series (National Bureau of Economic Research : Online) -- working paper no. 13993.
Publisher: National Bureau of Economic Research
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Cambridge, MA
Language: eng
Format: Electronic resource
Description: "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"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Notes: Title from PDF file as viewed on 7/9/2008.

Includes bibliographical references.

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Mode of access: World Wide Web.