Brookings Institution, Economic Studies, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, DC, USA.
J Health Econ. 2010 May;29(3):353-63. doi: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2010.02.007. Epub 2010 Mar 3.
This study examines whether maternal employment affects the health status of low-income, elementary-school-aged children using instrumental variables estimation and experimental data from a welfare-to-work program implemented in the early 1990s. Maternal report of child health status is predicted as a function of exogenous variation in maternal employment associated with random assignment to the experimental group. IV estimates show a modest adverse effect of maternal employment on children's health. Making use of data from another welfare-to-work program we propose that any adverse effect on child health may be tempered by increased family income and access to public health insurance coverage, findings with direct relevance to a number of current policy discussions. In a secondary analysis using fixed effects techniques on longitudinal survey data collected in 1998 and 2001, we find a comparable adverse effect of maternal employment on child health that supports the external validity of our primary result.
本研究使用工具变量估计和 20 世纪 90 年代早期实施的一项福利转就业计划的实验数据，考察了母亲就业是否会影响低收入、小学年龄儿童的健康状况。儿童健康状况的母亲报告被预测为与随机分配到实验组相关的母亲就业的外生变化的函数。IV 估计显示母亲就业对儿童健康有适度的不利影响。利用另一项福利转就业计划的数据，我们提出，任何对儿童健康的不利影响都可能因家庭收入增加和获得公共医疗保险覆盖而减轻，这些发现与当前许多政策讨论直接相关。在对 1998 年和 2001 年收集的纵向调查数据使用固定效应技术进行的二次分析中，我们发现母亲就业对儿童健康的类似不利影响支持了我们主要结果的外部有效性。
