title: Family investment responses to childhood health conditions: intrafamily allocation of resources.
abstract: The onset of a health condition during childhood impairs skill formation. A number of studies have investigated the long-lasting effects of poor health during childhood on later-in-life outcomes. However, this evidence ignores how parents respond to the onset of health conditions. Do their investments reinforce the health condition? Or compensate, or behave neutrally? If parents change their investments, the relationship between early health and later outcomes combines the biological effect and the investment responses. To address this question, I use within-sibling variation in the incidence of health conditions to control for selection from unobserved household heterogeneity. Parents invest, on average, 0.16 standard deviations less in children with mental conditions relative to their healthy siblings, using a measure of investment that includes time and resources. On the contrary, when children have a physical condition, parental investments do not differ across siblings. Results are robust to alternative measures of health conditions and the inclusion of child fixed effects.
authors: School of Education, University of California, Irvine - Irvine, CA 92697-5500, United States. Electronic address: mrosales@uchicago.edu.
authors: Maria Fernanda
authors: MF
authors: Rosales-Rueda
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D000067576:Child Health; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003657:Decision Making; D005191:Family Characteristics; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D008297:Male; D010287:Parent-Child Relations; D040841:Resource Allocation; D035781:Siblings
keywords: Capabilities; Family investments; Health conditions; House hold behavior; Intra-family allocation; Sibling estimator