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To prevent modern diseases such as obesity, cancer, cardiovascular conditions and diabetes, which have reached epidemic-like proportions in the last decades, many health experts have called for students to receive Health Education (HED) at school. Although this type of education aims mainly to improve children's health profiles, it might affect other family members as well. This paper exploits state HED reforms as quasi-natural experiments to estimate the causal impact of HED received by children on their parents' physical activity. We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) for the period 1999-2005 merged with data on state HED reforms from the National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) Health Policy Database, and the 2000 and 2006 School Health Policies and Programs Study (SHPPS). To identify the spillover effects of HED requirements on parents' behavior we use a "differences-in-differencesin-differences" (DDD) methodology in which we allow for different types of treatments. We find a positive effect of HED reforms at elementary school on parents' probability of doing light physical activity. The implementation of HED for the first time increases fathers' probability of engaging in physical activity in 14 percentage points, although it does not seem to affect mothers' probability of being physically active. We find evidence of two channels that may drive these spillovers. We conclude that information sharing between children and parents as well as the specialization of parents in doing typically-male or female activities with their children may play a role in generating these indirect effects and in turn in shaping healthy lifestyles within the household.JEL Classification: I12, I18, I28, C21.

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We study the causal effect of motherhood on labour market outcomes in Latin America by adopting an event study approach around the birth of the first child based on panel data from national household surveys for Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. Our main contributions are: (i) providing new and comparable evidence on the effects of motherhood on labour outcomes in developing countries; (ii) exploring the possible mechanisms driving these outcomes; (iii) discussing the potential links between child penalty and the prevailing gender norms and family policies in the region. We find that motherhood reduces women’s labour supply in the extensive and intensive margins and influences female occupational structure towards flexible occupations—part-time work, self-employment, and labour informality—needed for family–work balance. Furthermore, countries with more conservative gender norms and less generous family policies are associated with larger differences between mothers’ and non-mothers’ labour market outcomes.

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