Mother’s time allocation, child care and child cognitive development

An analyse of the effects of maternal employment and non-parental child care on child cognitive development, that takes into account the mother's time allocation between leisure and child-care time.

Dr. Brilli Ylenia estimates that a behavioural model, in which maternal labour supply, non-parental child care, goods expenditure and time allocation decisions are considered to be endogenous choices of the mother. The child cognitive development depends on maternal and non-parental child care and on the goods bought for the child. The model is estimated using US data from the Child Development Supplement and the Time Diary Section of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The results show that the productivity of mother's child-care time substantially differs by a mother's level of education. Moreover, the child-care time of college-educated mothers is more productive than non-parental child care. The simulation of maternity leave policies, mandating mothers not to work in the first two years of the child's life, reveals that the impact on the child's test score at age five is either positive or negative, depending on whether the leave is paid or not. The heterogeneous productivity of mothers' time leads to different allocation choices between child care and leisure: college-educated mothers re-allocate a larger fraction of their time out of work to child care than do the lower educated, while the opposite holds for leisure.

Ylenia Brilli is PhD in Economics (Department of Economics, European University Institute, Italy) specialized in labour and family economics and the economics of education. She is currently working on three different research projects. The first deals with the estimation of a model of mothers’ life-cycle behaviour, where labour supply, time allocation and non-parental child care choices are considered as endogenous and represent the inputs for the child development process. In a more recent work, she studies the impact of a reform, increasing the school leaving age, on adolescent crime. The third project aims at identifying the effects of public spending for child care and education on subsequent educational outcomes of children. Since February 2013, she has been involved in the project ‘Families and Societies – Changing Families and Sustainable Societies’ within the FP7 Framework Programme.