Evaluating the impact of mothers' self-esteem on early childhood home environment: Evidence from the NLSY

Description

Estimating the causal effects of parental characteristics on child outcomes is challenging due to endogeneity concerns. Using matched mother–child data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this paper integrates an orthogonalization technique into two-stage least squares (2SLS) instrumental variable (IV) regressions. The key findings indicate that an increase in mothers’ self-esteem leads to improvements in children’s home environments that foster both cognitive and emotional development, with larger effects observed among socioeconomically disadvantaged families. The magnitude of these effects is either greater than or comparable to those associated with mothers’ education and cognitive ability. In addition, we find that higher levels of maternal self-esteem are associated with improved reading abilities among children.

Publication Date

1-1-2018

Keywords

Childhood development, Home environment, Mothers' self-esteem, Instrumental variables, Orthogonalization

Conference

Society for Economic Research in India Annual Conference, 14-15 July, 2018

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