It’s all in the stars: The Chinese zodiac and the effects of parental investments on offspring’s cognitive and noncognitive skill developmentChih Ming Tan, Xiao Wang and Xiaobo Zhang No 1708, IFPRI discussion papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Abstract: The importance of (early) parental investments in children’s cognitive and noncognitive outcomes is a question of deep policy significance. However, because parental investments are arguably endogenous, it is a great challenge to empirically estimate their importance. This paper exploits a rich and novel dataset, the China Family Panel Studies, and proposes a culture-specific instrumental variable based on the Chinese zodiac, in order to address this empirical challenge. By looking at the outcomes of children born just before and just after the cutoff for a “lucky†versus “nonlucky†zodiac sign, we find that parents’ investments have significant effects on their offspring’s development of both cognitive and noncognitive skills. Keywords: CHINA; cognitive development; child development; economic development; human capital; parental investments; zodiac signs; early childhood educational investments; I10 Health: General; I15 Health and Economic Development; J24 Human Capital; Skills; Occupational Choice; Labor Productivity; O12 Microeconomic Analyses of Economic Development; O53 Economywide Country Studies: Asia including Middle East (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fpr:ifprid:1708 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in IFPRI discussion papers from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Contact information at EDIRC. |
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