Cover: The Response of Household Parental Investment to Child Endowments

The Response of Household Parental Investment to Child Endowments

Published in: Review of Economics of the Household, v. 6, no. 3, Sep. 2008, p. 223-242

Posted on RAND.org on September 01, 2008

by David S. Loughran, Ashlesha Datar, M. Rebecca Kilburn

The theoretical and empirical literature on parental investment focuses on whether child-specific parental investments reinforce or compensate for a child's initial endowments. However, many parental investments, such as neighborhood quality and family size and structure, are shared wholly or in part among all children in a household. The empirical results of this paper imply that such household parental investments compensate for low endowments, as proxied by low birth weight.

This report is part of the RAND Corporation External publication series. Many RAND studies are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, as chapters in commercial books, or as documents published by other organizations.

The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.