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The Role of Mothers and Fathers in Providing Skills: Evidence from Parental Deaths

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  • Jerome Adda
  • Anders Bjorklund
  • Helena Holmlund

Abstract

This paper evaluates the long-term consequences of parental death on children’s cognitive and noncognitive skills, as well as on labor market outcomes. We exploit a large administrative data set covering many Swedish cohorts. We develop new estimation methods to tackle the potential endogeneity of death at an early age, based on the idea that the amount of endogeneity is constant or decreasing during childhood. Our method also allows us to identify a set of death causes that are conditionally exogenous. We find that the loss of either a father or a mother on boys’ earnings is no higher than 6-7 percent and slightly lower for girls. Our examination of the impact on cognitive skills (IQ and educational attainment) and on noncognitive skills (emotional stability, social skills) shows rather small effects on each type of skill. We find that both mothers and fathers are important, but mothers are somewhat more important for cognitive skills and fathers for noncognitive ones.

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Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by European University Institute in its series Economics Working Papers with number ECO2011/08.

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Date of creation: 2011
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Handle: RePEc:eui:euiwps:eco2011/08

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Keywords: family background; cognitive and noncognitive skills; parental death;

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References

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  1. Cunha, Flavio & Heckman, James J., 2007. "The Technology of Skill Formation," IZA Discussion Papers 2550, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA).
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Citations

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Cited by:
  1. Gould, Eric D & Simhon, Avi, 2011. "Does Quality Time Produce Quality Children? Evidence on the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital using Parental Deaths," CEPR Discussion Papers 8258, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
  2. Massimiliano Bratti & Mariapia Mendola, 2011. "Parental Health and Child Schooling," Working Papers 212, University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics, revised Jul 2011.
  3. Timo Hener & Helmut Rainer & Thomas Siedler, 2012. "Political Socialization in Flux? Linking Family Non-Intactness during Childhood to Adult Civic Engagement," CESifo Working Paper Series 3918, CESifo Group Munich.
  4. Franz Westermaier & Brant Morefield & Andrea M. Mühlenweg, 2013. "Impacts of Parental Health Shocks on Children's Non-Cognitive Skills," SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research 542, DIW Berlin, The German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).
  5. Morefield, Brant & Mühlenweg, Andrea M. & Westermaier, Franz, 2011. "Impacts of parental health on children's development of personality traits and problem behavior: Evidence from parental health shocks," ZEW Discussion Papers 11-049, ZEW - Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung / Center for European Economic Research.

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