Collaborative Research: Estimating the Technology of Skill Formation and Maternal Well-Being

University Of Rochester, Rochester NY

Investigators

Abstract

This research project will study the effects of parental skills and investment on children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills development thus impacting the long term social and economic development of these children in later life. Previous studies of these effects rely on mothers' assessments of child non-cognitive skills---an assessment that may be biased---and do not account for maternal well-being on the dynamics of the child's cognitive and non-cognitive skill development. These omissions may affect the results of the effects of parental skills and investments on child development. The proposed research will use the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) to study the effects of parental skills and investment on children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills. In addition to assessment of non-cognitive skills by parents, the data set also contain assessment of non-cognitive skills by teachers and interviewers as well as the physical, mental, and emotional health of the mother. This will allow the researchers to study the reciprocal link from child to parent may generate important feedback effects on the child's development; therefore, limiting the biases that may arise from the omissions discussed above. The results of this research project will provide guidance to practitioners, educators and policymakers as they develop policies to improve to improve cognitive and non-cognitive skills of children. Helping to understand how to improve cognitive and non-cognitive skills among children will result in a stronger work force, thus improving the long-run performance of the U.S. economy. Previous studies of the effects of parental skills and investment on children's cognitive and non-cognitive skills development suffer from two potential sources of bias: they rely on the mother's, possibly biased, assessment of the child's non-cognitive skills and do not allow for possible feedback effect the child's cognitive and non-cognitive development may have on the mother's skills. To address these issues, the PIs will use two features of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS). First, the MCS dataset collects measures of child non-cognitive skills from mothers, and from interviewers and teachers. Second, the MCS interviews mothers on their mental health and life satisfaction during each wave of the survey. Using this data, the PIs will estimate a technology of skill formation characterized by dynamic, nonlinear production functions where both inputs and outputs are unobserved. Key inputs include contemporaneous child skills, parental skills, and parental investment, while the next period's cognitive and non-cognitive skills for both the child and the mother are the relevant outputs. To achieve identification, the researchers rely on the availability of noisy measures of child skills, parental skills and parental investment each period, following the methodology of Cunha, Heckman and Schennach (2010). The identification of the contamination of mother-assessed child non-cognitive skills relies on allowing the observed measures of non-cognitive skills, as reported by teachers and interviewers, to be a function of both maternal skills and child skills. The results of this research project will contribute to a better understanding of the link between parental skills and investment and child outcomes and will provide guidance to practitioners, educators and policymakers as they develop policies to improve cognitive and non-cognitive skill development of children.