Schooling and Parental Death

Gertler, Paul; Levine, David I.; Ames, Minnie

doi:10.1162/003465304323023769

Cited by 149 publications

(111 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…In a related literature, some influential studies investigate the effect of that extreme form of health shock which is parental death. Gertler et al (2004) use three repeated crosssections of household data from Indonesia to test how the loss of a parent affects investment in children. They find that a parent's recent death has a large effect on the child's school enrollment, irrespective of the gender of the child and of the parent who dies.…”

Section: Background Literature and Our Main Contributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parental Health and Child Schooling

Bratti

Mendola

2011

SSRN Journal

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Evidence on the role of parental health on child schooling is surprisingly thin. We explore this issue by estimating the short-run effects of parents' illness on child school enrollment. Our analysis is based on household panel data from Bosnia-Herzegovina, a country whose health and educational systems underwent extensive destruction during the 1992-1995 war. Using child fixed effects to correct for potential endogeneity bias, we find that-contrary to the common wisdom that shocks to the primary household earner should have more negative consequences for child education-it is especially maternal health that makes a difference as far as child schooling is concerned. Children whose mothers selfreported having poor health are about 7 percentage points less likely to be enrolled in education at ages 15-24. These results are robust to considering alternative indicators of parental health status such as the presence of limitations in the activities of daily living and depression symptoms. Moreover, we find that mothers' health shocks have more negative consequences on younger children and sons. JEL. I21 O15

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Section: Background Literature and Our Main Contributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parental Health and Child Schooling

Bratti

Mendola

2011

SSRN Journal

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“…As married women become more involved in work activities located outside the home there will be a growing need to find a substitute to do important domestic work (cooking, cleaning, childcare, etc.). In the context of Ouagadougou, where there is a lack of public facilities for taking care of small children and a general unwillingness of men to participate in domestic activities, it may often be the case that the firstborn daughter is called upon to provide that work, with adverse consequences for her schooling (Gertler, Levine, and Ames 2004;Montandon and Sapru 2002).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Two ways commonly used in the region are hiring a young maid or fostering in an older child to help with domestic work. Nonetheless, a number of studies have shown that, in the absence of the mother and without adequate child care policies, girls -and especially the oldest daughter -are often called upon to assume the maternal figure, with adverse effects on their schooling (Gertler, Levine, and Ames 2004;Montandon and Sapru 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Family size and intra-family inequalities in education in Ouagadougou

Lachaud¹,

Adjiwanou²,

Legrand³

et al. 2014

DemRes

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BACKGROUNDWhile the potential benefits for educational investment of decline in family size are well known, some questions have emerged on the distribution of these benefits. Do all the children in a family benefit equitably from the improved conditions brought about by limiting their number? And what are the consequences of reduction in family size for social inequalities in educational opportunity within the family? OBJECTIVEThis study aims to analyze the inequalities in education between children within the same family in the context of falling fertility in Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso. METHODSInequalities in school attainment are analyzed, first in regard to family sizes and second in terms of gender, birth order, and the interactions between these two variables. Probit models are estimated and adjusted Wald F statistics with Bonferroni corrections for multiple comparisons are computed. RESULTSThe results show that family households with fewer children exhibit different patterns of investment in children's schooling, with lower inequalities between children by gender and birth order. At the post-primary level, however, the firstborn girls in small families appear to be less likely to be enrolled in school compared with those in large 1 University of Montreal; Quebec, Canada. E-Mail: james.lachaud@umontreal.ca. 2 University of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 3 University of Cape Town, South Africa. 4 Institut supérieur des sciences de la population (ISSP), University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Lachaud et al.: Family size and intra-family inequalities in education in Ouagadougou 1456http://www.demographic-research.org families, and also to be disadvantaged in their schooling compared to other children of small families. CONCLUSIONSReduced fertility appears to have negative effects on the schooling of the oldest girls and beneficial effects for all other children in the household. To mitigate this disadvantage, measures should be considered to reconcile domestic work with the new opportunities emerging from expanding school systems and smaller family sizes.

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“…Typically this has involved exploiting plausibly exogenous sources of variation in family structure through natural experiments or instrumental variables methods (Lang & Zagorsky, 2001;Gruber, 2004;Finlay & Neumark, 2010) and also accounting for unobserved heterogeneity through the use of individual fixed effects (Cherlin et al, 1991), sibling fixed effects (Ermisch et al, 2004;Evenhouse & Reilly, 2004) and propensity score matching (Gertler et al, 2004). After accounting for endogeneity issues, these studies tend to find that divorce does not deteriorate children's outcomes.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%