Parental preferences, production technologies, and provision for progeny

Maoliang Ye and Junjian Yi

Journal of Comparative Economics, 2017, vol. 45, issue 2, 261-270

Abstract: This paper theoretically explores the implications of the recent developments in the study of human capital production technologies (Cunha and Heckman, 2007) in intrahousehold human capital investment in children (Becker and Tomes, 1976; Behrman et al., 1982). When credit constraints are not binding, parents adopt a reinforcing intrahousehold investment strategy. When credit constraints are binding, the trade-off between the degree of parental aversion to inequality and the degree of complementarity between pre-natal endowments and family investments determines the parental strategy. The observed investment pattern of reinforcement or compensation does not necessarily reveal the underlying preference or technological parameters. Finally, we discuss empirical methods that may separately identify the preference and technological parameters and discuss the econometric challenges associated with these methods.

Keywords: Intrahousehold human capital investments; Reinforce; Compensate; Parental preferences; Production technology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D10 D13 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147596716300579
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jcecon:v:45:y:2017:i:2:p:261-270

DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2016.09.003

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Comparative Economics is currently edited by D. Berkowitz and G. Roland

More articles in Journal of Comparative Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().