Mothers Working during Preschool Years and Child Skills

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Emma Tominey argues that mothers' preschool labor supply decreases time investments but increases income, positively affecting mid-childhood and teenage

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Emma Tominey argues that mothers’ preschool labor supply decreases time investments but increases income, positively affecting mid-childhood and teenage

Image courtesy of interviewee. January 31, 2024

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This video video discusses a study investigating the effects of maternal working hours on children's outcomes in Norway. The research focuses on first-time mothers with preschool-age children and examines how increased working hours affect their children as they grow into mid-childhood and teenage years.

The study posits two primary channels:
1. **Time Investment Channel**: As mothers work more hours, they spend less time with their children, potentially leading to negative outcomes. In Norway, children often enter high-quality formal childcare during this time.
2. **Income Channel**: Increased maternal income may provide benefits through improved resources for the child, such as access to better food, educational materials, and neighborhoods with better schools.

The research utilizes extensive population-level data, analyzing variations in maternal hours and income while testing the influence of these factors on child development. The study finds that while there is a negative coefficient associated with the time investment channel, it is not statistically significant, indicating that the time spent with children in Norway is as productive as care provided elsewhere. In contrast, the income channel has a strong positive effect, suggesting that increased maternal earnings can offset any negative impacts from reduced time investment.

Additionally, subgroup analyses indicate that while the time investment effect is stronger in higher-educated households, the income effect consistently compensates across different household types, regardless of education level or gender of the child. The findings suggest that government policies promoting subsidized and high-quality childcare can enable mothers to work more without harming child outcomes.

The study emphasizes the importance of not only subsidizing childcare but ensuring its quality, offering insights for policymakers aiming to support working mothers and benefit children’s development.

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So what we're interested in understanding is what's the

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effect of mothers working hours on their children?

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So we're in the context in Norway.

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Um, mothers have just had their first child

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and their first child's at preschool age,

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so they haven't started school yet.

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And we're really interested in understanding

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if mothers decide to work extra hours,

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what's the effect on their children when their children are

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at school in mid childhood?

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Does it even have an effect on their children in,

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in teenage years later in life?

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Um, so this is interesting question

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because when mothers are increasing their hours,

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there are two important things that change in the household.

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So on the one hand, the mother's spending less time

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with their child, they're at work,

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and their child's gonna spend more time with somebody else.

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So this is the counterfactual childcare in Norway that tends

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to be, they're gonna spend more,

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this children are gonna spend more time in a

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formal childcare setting.

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Um, and so this is gonna be a,

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we are gonna call this a time investment channel.

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We're really interested in understanding if there's a

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negative or positive effect from mothers from

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the time investment channel.

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Um, but the second thing that changes is

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that mothers are working that earning money

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and they're bringing money into their household.

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And potentially that money can be spent in a way

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that benefits children as well.

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So they can maybe buy books, they can buy better food,

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they can even if they earn enough money

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by a household in a neighborhood with better schools.

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So this is our income channel, and what we try

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and do in a paper is not just estimate the total effect

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of mother's working hours,

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but to understand these two spec different channels

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of the time investment channel and the income channel.

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And the question we ask is, can income compensate any

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negative time investment channel?

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Our paper comes in, with a background of other papers,

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initially more descriptive papers trying

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to understand the correlation

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between mom's working hours and children.

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And then more recently, the causal,

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causal inference literature has grown.

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So for example, we've got paper by BLO and Grossberg, ER

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and Francesconi, and these are based in the US

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and the UK respectively.

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And they ask, what's the effect of mothers working hours

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and tend to find a negative effect.

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Um, so the innovation in our paper is that,

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well, there are two things really.

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Firstly, we're in a different context.

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We're in a context in Norway

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where the government invests in high quality

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early school childcare.

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So when the mothers,

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is predominantly mothers are deciding,

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should I increase my hours?

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They know that their children are gonna go

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to a high quality nursery.

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Um, and that's different to the UK and the us.

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So it is really important to understand, you know,

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o other results from the previous

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literature which find this negative

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effect on mother's working hours. Are they context

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Specific?

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Um, and then the second innovation in our paper is,

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like I say, we really wanna dig a little bit deeper

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to understand the how

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and not just why, sorry,

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not just whether mother's labor supply,

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improve child outcomes, but, but how.

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So that's digging deep into these two different mechanisms

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of the time investment and the income channels.

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We're in the context of Norway, like I said.

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Um, and we're very lucky in the Norwegian context

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that we can observe the population level data

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called big data.

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So our families in the dataset

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and our sample, they are the whole population of Norway

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who have a child between 1997 and 2001.

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Okay? So we can observe all of these households,

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but what if you think about what we need

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to do in our methodology is

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to create exogenous variation in the mother's

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hours, working hours.

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Um, but also for the income channel, we need

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to have a methodology

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that can create exogenous variation in the household income

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so that we can decompose these two channels in a cordal

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causal mediation analysis.

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So the way that we do that is we have an extension

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to a literature called the partially

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overlapping peer literature.

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So let me explain this. The idea is that

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for every household in Norway, we're very lucky that

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what we can do is we can observe all

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of their family members.

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So we take the, for every household we can see the sisters

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and the sisters-in-law who have already had a child

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and who've already made their labor supply decisions.

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We can also observe every single workmate for these,

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for everybody in the population.

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Um, and so we, what we do is we take a set

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of workmates belonging to each household who have, again,

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already had a child

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and have already made their decisions about labor supply.

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And from the partially overlapping peer group literature,

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what we know is that we can create an instrumental variable,

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for example, for hours by taking the hours decisions

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made by their workmates.

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For our family members for income,

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we can construct an instrumental variable,

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which is the income of their family's workmates.

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So you can see that we are using what's called peers

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or peers as instrumental variable for the decisions

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of these households.

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Um, so when doing so, we have a lot of checks in our paper,

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and a a lot of analysis to test the validity

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of these instrumental variables.

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So we make sure that we control

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for androgynous peer group membership, for example.

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Um, and we're left with the situation where we believe

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that our instrumental variables create exogenous variation

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in income and hours in a way that's not directly correlated

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with the child outcomes, except through income and hours.

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So then we can estimate the effect of

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both mother's hours in the preschool years and children

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and income in the preschool years of children.

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But we combine this into a causal mediation analysis,

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which allows us to

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Decompose, the effect

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of mom's working hours into the time and the income checks.

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What we find is that hours

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and income in the preschool years do have an effect on child

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Tesco outcomes when they're 11 and when they're 15.

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So specifically in the whole, in a total sample,

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we estimate, we do estimate a negative coefficient on ours,

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conditional on income, which tells us

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that there's a negative time investment channel.

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But in this context of Norway, it was never,

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it wasn't statistically significant.

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So we can say there's a a zero effect.

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So mom's time with a child is as productive

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as in this counterfactual care,

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but there's a really strong effect coming through income.

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Um, so as mothers are, sorry,

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there's a positive effect on income and child outcomes.

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And so when we did the causal mediation analysis,

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what we find is that when mothers are working,

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they're increasing their hours.

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There's essentially no effect

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through the time investment channel,

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but a very strong positive effect

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through the income channel.

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So ultimately, yes, income can compensate for any

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negative effect for the time investment channels.

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Um, so to understand what's going on a little bit more,

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we wanna speak to the child development literature.

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Um, and I think we can say a little bit more by

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looking at our subgroup analysis.

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So we divided the samples into high educated households,

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low educated households.

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We look separately for girls, for boys.

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And in all of these cases, it's always true

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that income compensates.

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So we never, never ever found a negative effect

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of mom's working hours as a total effect

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because income always compensated.

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But the time investment and the income channels are

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different across different household types,

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and we can learn from that.

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So for example, if you think about high educated households,

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this is where the mother's got a degree.

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Um, and we found

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that the negative time investment channel is most strong in

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these households, which is intuitive

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because it tells us that when a mother's spending time

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with a child, she can pass on some of her skills

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to the children in a way

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that improves their outcome later in life.

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So we've got this strong,

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relatively strong negative time investment channel,

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but these mothers earn more money,

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they're bringing more money into the household.

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So their income channel was particularly strong in a way

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which meant, again, income did compensate.

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Um, and our other analysis that we did to understand,

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you know, why, what's going on, why is income so important,

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why is it able to compensate

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for any ne negative time investment channels?

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And to do that, we looked at as best we could, we tried

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to understand,

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how did these households spend their money?

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And what we found is that there's a positive effect

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of mothers, income that's earned in the preschool years

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on their house value as a children at age six, just

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as those preschool years end.

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So it's suggesting that these families are

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Able to buy more expensive households,

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more expensive houses, and we also find

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that there's a positive effect on the quality of the school

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that the children are going to, which tells us

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that they're buying a more expensive house in

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an area with better schools.

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So this is potentially one of the channels through which,

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income can benefit children.

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Yeah. So I think we can learn a lot,

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from this paper in a way that can influence policy.

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So remember, we've got this backdrop of papers in the UK

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and the US that find a negative effect of mother's hours.

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And we find the opposite.

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We find there's no other negative effect

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of moms deciding to work more hours.

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In fact, often there's a positive effect.

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I say that's super important

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because the change in labor supply we see in developed

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countries is for mothers to be increasing their hours,

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they're moving towards full-time contracts.

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And we can see that that can be done in a way

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that doesn't harm your children.

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But what's really important is that we're in Norway,

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we're in a context where when a mother decides to go

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to work, she knows that her child can go

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to a childcare setting, which is high quality.

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So they're highly subsidized in Norway,

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but they're highly standardized as well.

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So if these mothers are low income, if they're high income,

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they know that their children are gonna go

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to a good childcare setting.

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So what we can learn for governments across the world

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is it's important to subsidize childcare.

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And we see that happening more and more,

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but the quality of the childcare is equally as important.

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So we really recommend that,

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when governments are thinking about these kind

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of childcare policies, they can subsidize,

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but standardize the level

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of care within these childcare settings.

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So it's high quality.

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And in that setting, we can encourage mothers to work

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and to be productive in a way

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that can even benefit children.

Mothers' Work Hours: Impact on Child Outcomes

00:00:00 - So what we're interested in understanding is what's the effect of mothers working hours on their children? So we're in the context in Norway. mothers have just had their first child and their first child's at preschool age, so they haven't started school yet. And we're really interested in understanding if mothers decide to work extra hours, what's the effect on their children when their children are at school in mid childhood? Does it even have an effect on their children in, in teenage years later in life?
00:00:33 - because when mothers are increasing their hours, there are two important things that change in the household. So on the one hand, the mother's spending less time with their child, they're at work, and their child's gonna spend more time with somebody else. So this is the counterfactual childcare in Norway that tends to be, they're gonna spend more, this children are gonna spend more time in a formal childcare setting. and so this is gonna be a, we are gonna call this a time investment channel.
00:01:05 - negative or positive effect from mothers from the time investment channel. but the second thing that changes is that mothers are working that earning money and they're bringing money into their household. And potentially that money can be spent in a way that benefits children as well. So they can maybe buy books, they can buy better food, they can even if they earn enough money by a household in a neighborhood with better schools. So this is our income channel, and what we try
00:01:36 - of mother's working hours, but to understand these two spec different channels of the time investment channel and the income channel. And the question we ask is, can income compensate any negative time investment channel? Our paper comes in, with a background of other papers, initially more descriptive papers trying to understand the correlation between mom's working hours and children. And then more recently, the causal,
00:02:07 - So for example, we've got paper by BLO and Grossberg, and Francesconi, and these are based in the US and the UK respectively. And they ask, what's the effect of mothers working hours and tend to find a negative effect. so the innovation in our paper is that, well, there are two things really. Firstly, we're in a different context. We're in a context in Norway where the government invests in high quality early school childcare.
00:02:38 - is predominantly mothers are deciding, should I increase my hours? They know that their children are gonna go to a high quality nursery. and that's different to the UK and the us. So it is really important to understand, you know, o other results from the previous literature which find this negative effect on mother's working hours. Are they context Specific? and then the second innovation in our paper is, like I say, we really wanna dig a little bit deeper to understand the how

Impact of Maternal Work on Child Development

00:03:09 - not just whether mother's labor supply, improve child outcomes, but, but how. So that's digging deep into these two different mechanisms of the time investment and the income channels. We're in the context of Norway, like I said. and we're very lucky in the Norwegian context that we can observe the population level data called big data. So our families in the dataset and our sample, they are the whole population of Norway who have a child between 1997 and 2001.
00:03:41 - but what if you think about what we need to do in our methodology is to create exogenous variation in the mother's hours, working hours. but also for the income channel, we need to have a methodology that can create exogenous variation in the household income so that we can decompose these two channels in a cordal causal mediation analysis. So the way that we do that is we have an extension to a literature called the partially
00:04:11 - So let me explain this. The idea is that for every household in Norway, we're very lucky that what we can do is we can observe all of their family members. So we take the, for every household we can see the sisters and the sisters-in-law who have already had a child and who've already made their labor supply decisions. We can also observe every single workmate for these, for everybody in the population. and so we, what we do is we take a set of workmates belonging to each household who have, again,
00:04:42 - and have already made their decisions about labor supply. And from the partially overlapping peer group literature, what we know is that we can create an instrumental variable, for example, for hours by taking the hours decisions made by their workmates. For our family members for income, we can construct an instrumental variable, which is the income of their family's workmates. So you can see that we are using what's called peers or peers as instrumental variable for the decisions
00:05:14 - so when doing so, we have a lot of checks in our paper, and a a lot of analysis to test the validity of these instrumental variables. So we make sure that we control for androgynous peer group membership, for example. and we're left with the situation where we believe that our instrumental variables create exogenous variation in income and hours in a way that's not directly correlated with the child outcomes, except through income and hours.
00:05:46 - both mother's hours in the preschool years and children and income in the preschool years of children. But we combine this into a causal mediation analysis, which allows us to Decompose, the effect of mom's working hours into the time and the income checks. What we find is that hours and income in the preschool years do have an effect on child Tesco outcomes when they're 11 and when they're 15. So specifically in the whole, in a total sample,

Impact of Income on Child Development Outcomes

00:06:18 - conditional on income, which tells us that there's a negative time investment channel. But in this context of Norway, it was never, it wasn't statistically significant. So we can say there's a a zero effect. So mom's time with a child is as productive as in this counterfactual care, but there's a really strong effect coming through income. so as mothers are, sorry, there's a positive effect on income and child outcomes. And so when we did the causal mediation analysis,
00:06:48 - they're increasing their hours. There's essentially no effect through the time investment channel, but a very strong positive effect through the income channel. So ultimately, yes, income can compensate for any negative effect for the time investment channels. so to understand what's going on a little bit more, we wanna speak to the child development literature. and I think we can say a little bit more by looking at our subgroup analysis.
00:07:21 - low educated households. We look separately for girls, for boys. And in all of these cases, it's always true that income compensates. So we never, never ever found a negative effect of mom's working hours as a total effect because income always compensated. But the time investment and the income channels are different across different household types, and we can learn from that. So for example, if you think about high educated households, this is where the mother's got a degree.
00:07:50 - that the negative time investment channel is most strong in these households, which is intuitive because it tells us that when a mother's spending time with a child, she can pass on some of her skills to the children in a way that improves their outcome later in life. So we've got this strong, relatively strong negative time investment channel, but these mothers earn more money, they're bringing more money into the household. So their income channel was particularly strong in a way which meant, again, income did compensate.
00:08:24 - you know, why, what's going on, why is income so important, why is it able to compensate for any ne negative time investment channels? And to do that, we looked at as best we could, we tried to understand, how did these households spend their money? And what we found is that there's a positive effect of mothers, income that's earned in the preschool years on their house value as a children at age six, just as those preschool years end.
00:08:54 - Able to buy more expensive households, more expensive houses, and we also find that there's a positive effect on the quality of the school that the children are going to, which tells us that they're buying a more expensive house in an area with better schools. So this is potentially one of the channels through which, income can benefit children. Yeah. So I think we can learn a lot, from this paper in a way that can influence policy.

Impact of Maternal Work Hours on Child Outcomes

00:09:25 - and the US that find a negative effect of mother's hours. And we find the opposite. We find there's no other negative effect of moms deciding to work more hours. In fact, often there's a positive effect. I say that's super important because the change in labor supply we see in developed countries is for mothers to be increasing their hours, they're moving towards full-time contracts. And we can see that that can be done in a way that doesn't harm your children. But what's really important is that we're in Norway,
00:09:55 - to work, she knows that her child can go to a childcare setting, which is high quality. So they're highly subsidized in Norway, but they're highly standardized as well. So if these mothers are low income, if they're high income, they know that their children are gonna go to a good childcare setting. So what we can learn for governments across the world is it's important to subsidize childcare. And we see that happening more and more, but the quality of the childcare is equally as important.
00:10:42 - when governments are thinking about these kind of childcare policies, they can subsidize, but standardize the level of care within these childcare settings. So it's high quality. And in that setting, we can encourage mothers to work and to be productive in a way that can even benefit children.

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Mothers Working during Preschool Years and Child Skills

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