Heterogeneous parental impacts on infant health outcome

ABSTRACT

Policymakers have long sought to mitigate the losses associated with single-mother child rearing relative to dual-parenting. Using the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing (FFCW) data, we apply a flexible IV-ordered probit (IV-OP) model to show that the infant health impact of nonresident paternal time diminishes as single-mothers’ earnings increase.

KEYWORDS:

• Child health
• parental impacts
• semiparametric
• nonresident father

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C14
• I12
• J12
• J13

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ See T&P for a full description of the sample selection procedure and its plausibility.

² Poor/fair/good is a single category because of low frequencies.

³ Since earnings are measured pre-birth, we do not expect a reverse causal effect of child health on earnings. Though mothers may adjust earnings pre-birth in anticipation of future health shocks, we find no effect of earnings on a child's birth weight (0.023, p. = 0.625) and physical disability (−0.012, p. = 0.810).

⁴ Given the high attrition of fathers, most FFCW studies use mothers’ reports.

⁵ T&P show resemblance strongly relates to paternal time. They conduct several tests supporting its validity as an IV (e.g. resemblance effects not confounded by parents’ relationship quality), so we do not replicate efforts here.

⁶ This transformation mitigates outliers on the semiparametric approach.

⁷ Results of a Monte Carlo simulation support the model’s satisfactory finite sample properties. We can provide the results and R codes upon request.