Parents invest both material resources and their time into raising their children. Time investment in children is important to the development of human capital. It is also one possible mechanism through which economic status is transmitted from generation to generation. This paper examines parental time allocated to the care of one's children. First, using data from the recent American Time Use Surveys, we highlight what we think are the most interesting cross-sectional patterns in time spent by American parents as they care for their children. (We will refer to the concepts of parental "child care" and parental "time spent with their children" interchangeably, though we discuss in the next section that the two measures might capture different things.) We find that higher-educated parents spend more time with their children; for example, mothers with a college education or greater spend roughly 4.5 hours more per week in child care than mothers with a high school degree or less. This relationship is striking, given that higher-educated parents also spend more time working outside the home. This robust relationship holds across all subgroups examined, including both nonworking and working mothers and working fathers. It also holds across all four subcategories of child care: basic, educational, recreational, and travel related to child care. From an economic perspective, this positive education gradient in child care (and a similar positive gradient found for income)

This paper uses random assignment in professional golf tournaments to test for peer effects in the workplace. We find no evidence that playing partners’ ability affects performance, contrary to recent evidence on peer effects in the workplace from laboratory experiments, grocery scanners, and soft-fruit pickers. In our preferred specification we can rule out peer effects larger than 0.043 strokes for a one stroke increase in playing partners’ ability. Our results complement existing studies on workplace peer effects and are useful in explaining how social effects vary across labor markets, across individuals, and with the form of incentives faced.

We make use of a new data resource-merged birth and school records for all children born in Florida from 1992 to 2002-to study the relationship between birth weight and cognitive development. Using singletons as well as twin and sibling fixed effects models, we find that the effects of early health on cognitive development are essentially constant through the school career; that these effects are similar across a wide range of family backgrounds; and that they are invariant to measures of school quality. We conclude that the effects of early health on adult outcomes are therefore set very early. (JEL I12, J13, J24) A large literature documents the effects of neonatal health (commonly proxied by birth weight) on a wide range of adult outcomes such as wages, disability, adult chronic conditions, and human capital accumulation. A series of studies, conducted in a variety of countries including Canada, Chile, China, Norway, and the United States, have made use of twin comparisons to show that the heavier twin of the pair is more likely to have better adult outcomes measured in various ways. 1

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