IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecm/wc2000/1282.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Income Composition, Endogenous Fertility and Schooling Investments in Children

Author

Listed:
  • Fernando A. Veloso

    (University of Chicago)

Abstract

This paper studies how the composition of income between mothers and fathers affects fertility and schooling investments in children, using data from the 1976 and 1996 PNAD, a Brazilian household survey. Income composition affects the time cost of fertility because mothers and fathers allocate different amounts of time to child-rearing. These effects are in turn transmitted to investments in children through a tradeoff between quantity and quality of children. The main contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it derives new implications about the relationship between household income composition and schooling investments in children. Second, this paper devises and implements an empirical approach to assess these implications, using two cross-sections of fertility and schooling data from Brazil. The main empirical findings of the paper can be summarized as follows. First, the empirical analysis shows that a larger negative effect of the mother's labor income on fertility in 1996 is associated with a larger positive effect on the adult child's schooling, reflecting the interaction between quantity and quality of children. Second, the larger negative effect of the mother's labor income on fertility in 1996 is associated with a reduction in the effect of other determinants of number of children. This suggests that an increase in the relative importance of time costs of fertility may be an important determinant of variations in fertility over time in Brazil and other developing countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Fernando A. Veloso, 2000. "Income Composition, Endogenous Fertility and Schooling Investments in Children," Econometric Society World Congress 2000 Contributed Papers 1282, Econometric Society.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecm:wc2000:1282
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://fmwww.bc.edu/RePEc/es2000/1282.pdf
    File Function: main text
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Lam, David & Schoeni, Robert F, 1993. "Effects of Family Background on Earnings and Returns to Schooling: Evidence from Brazil," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 101(4), pages 710-740, August.
    2. Abhijit V. Banerjee & Andrew F. Newman, 1991. "Risk-Bearing and the Theory of Income Distribution," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 58(2), pages 211-235.
    3. Becker, Gary S & Tomes, Nigel, 1976. "Child Endowments and the Quantity and Quality of Children," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 84(4), pages 143-162, August.
    4. Lam, David, 1986. "The Dynamics of Population Growth, Differential Fertility, and Inequality," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 76(5), pages 1103-1116, December.
    5. Oded Galor & Joseph Zeira, 1993. "Income Distribution and Macroeconomics," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 60(1), pages 35-52.
    6. Becker, Gary S & Lewis, H Gregg, 1973. "On the Interaction between the Quantity and Quality of Children," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 81(2), pages 279-288, Part II, .
    7. Gary S. Becker & Nigel Tomes, 1994. "Human Capital and the Rise and Fall of Families," NBER Chapters,in: Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (3rd Edition), pages 257-298 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Lam, David & Levison, Deborah, 1991. "Declining inequality in schooling in Brazil and its effects on inequality in earnings," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 37(1-2), pages 199-225, November.
    9. Birdsall, Nancy, 1988. "Economic approaches to population growth," Handbook of Development Economics,in: Hollis Chenery & T.N. Srinivasan (ed.), Handbook of Development Economics, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 12, pages 477-542 Elsevier.
    10. Song Han & Casey B. Mulligan, "undated". "Human Capital, Heterogeneity, and the Estimation of Degrees of Intergenerational Mobility," University of Chicago - Population Research Center 97-3, Chicago - Population Research Center.
    11. Kremer, Michael & Chen, Daniel L, 2002. "Income Distribution Dynamics with Endogenous Fertility," Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 7(3), pages 227-258, September.
    12. Gary S. Becker & Robert J. Barro, 1988. "A Reformulation of the Economic Theory of Fertility," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 103(1), pages 1-25.
    13. Robert T. Michael, 1974. "Education and the Derived Demand for Children," NBER Chapters,in: Economics of the Family: Marriage, Children, and Human Capital, pages 120-159 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    14. Ben-Porath, Yoram, 1973. "Economic Analysis of Fertility in Israel: Point and Counterpoint," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 81(2), pages 202-233, Part II, .
    15. Willis, Robert J, 1973. "A New Approach to the Economic Theory of Fertility Behavior," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 81(2), pages 14-64, Part II, .
    16. Schultz, Theodore W., 1979. "The Economics of Being Poor," Nobel Prize in Economics documents 1979-1, Nobel Prize Committee.
    17. Theodore W. Schultz, 1974. "Fertility and Economic Values," NBER Chapters,in: Economics of the Family: Marriage, Children, and Human Capital, pages 3-22 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    18. Behrman, Jere R & Taubman, Paul, 1990. "The Intergenerational Correlation between Children's Adult Earnings and Their Parents' Income: Result from the Michigan Panel Survey of Income Dynamics," Review of Income and Wealth, International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, vol. 36(2), pages 115-127, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fernando Veloso, 2000. "Wealth Composition, Endogenous Fertility and the Dynamics of Income Inequality," Econometric Society World Congress 2000 Contributed Papers 1281, Econometric Society.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecm:wc2000:1282. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Christopher F. Baum). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/essssea.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.