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Title: Family Investment Responses to Childhood Health Conditions: Intrafamily Allocation of Resources
Resulting in 1 citation.
1. Rosales-Rueda, Maria Fernanda
Family Investment Responses to Childhood Health Conditions: Intrafamily Allocation of Resources
Journal of Health Economics 37 (September 2014): 41-57.
Also: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167629614000691
Cohort(s): Children of the NLSY79, NLSY79
Publisher: Elsevier
Keyword(s): Birth Order; Birthweight; Child Health, Limiting Condition(s); Children, Mental Health; Family Resources; Family Structure; Home Observation for Measurement of Environment (HOME); Mothers, Education; Parental Investments; Pre-natal Care/Exposure; Self-Esteem; Siblings

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.
Bibliography Citation
Rosales-Rueda, Maria Fernanda. "Family Investment Responses to Childhood Health Conditions: Intrafamily Allocation of Resources." Journal of Health Economics 37 (September 2014): 41-57.