Evaluating the impact of mothers' self-esteem on early childhood home environment: Evidence from the NLSY
Description
Estimating causal effects of parental characteristics on determinants of child outcomes is complicated due to endogeneity problems. Utilizing matched mother-child data from National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth, this paper integrates an orthogonalization technique to 2SLS-IV regressions. The key findings indicate that a rise in mothers' self-esteem improves children's home environment conditions that promote cognitive and emotional developments, with larger effects observed among mothers in socio-economically disadvantaged families. The magnitude of these effects are either higher than or comparable to the effects of mothers' education and cognitive ability. Additionally, we find that a rise in mothers' self-esteem improves children's reading abilities.
Copyright Date
January 2018
Publication Date
1-1-2018
Publisher
Ashoka University, New Delhi
Keywords
Childhood development, Home environment, Mothers' self-esteem, Instrumental variables, Orthogonalization
Conference
Weekly Economics Seminar with Tirthatanmoy Das, April 16, 2018 @ 2:50 pm - 4:00 pm, Ashoka University,