Bishai D
Leonard Davis Institute, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, USA.
Health Econ. 1996 Sep-Oct;5(5):383-407. doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1099-1050(199609)5:5<383::AID-HEC225>3.0.CO;2-W.
A child health production function is presented with the key feature being an interaction term between a caregiver's schooling and their exposure time to the child. The production function is estimated using a 2SLS fixed effects model with lagged childcare time, resource allocation and child health as instruments for the first differences of these same endogenous variables. The 1978 Intrafamily Food Distribution and Feeding Practices Survey dataset from Bangladesh is used together with census data. The production function estimates indicate that part of the salutary effects of parental education on child health require that the child actually be exposed to the educated parent. Given the demographic makeup of the study sample and the assumption that age education and gender completely account for productivity, teenage brothers and fathers would have the highest marginal productivity for child health and mothers and grandmothers the least. If economic opportunity draws mothers away from childcare, the presence of other household members with higher schooling levels offers the potential for an improvement in the overall quality of childcare time. In the present study the households failed to set the marginal labour product of child health for each of the caregivers equal. Thus, the quality of childcare may not be the household's sole concern in determining time allocation.
本文提出了一个儿童健康生产函数，其关键特征是照顾者的受教育程度与他们陪伴孩子的时间之间的交互项。该生产函数使用两阶段最小二乘法固定效应模型进行估计，将滞后的育儿时间、资源分配和儿童健康作为这些相同内生变量一阶差分的工具变量。研究使用了来自孟加拉国的1978年家庭内部食物分配和喂养习惯调查数据集以及人口普查数据。生产函数估计结果表明，父母教育对儿童健康的部分有益影响要求孩子实际接触受过教育的父母。鉴于研究样本的人口构成以及年龄、教育程度和性别完全决定生产力的假设，青少年兄弟和父亲对儿童健康的边际生产力最高，而母亲和祖母的边际生产力最低。如果经济机会使母亲离开育儿工作，其他受教育程度较高的家庭成员的存在有可能提高育儿时间的整体质量。在本研究中，家庭未能使每位照顾者的儿童健康边际劳动产出相等。因此，在决定时间分配时，育儿质量可能不是家庭唯一关心的问题。
