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The impact of biological preferences on parental investments in children and step-children

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Abstract

A remarriage typically involves significant changes in a family’s financial circumstance, and these changes, combined with the relative bargaining relationship between spouses, likely affect the well-being of the children who are part of the family. In this paper, I use the separate-spheres model, a theoretical model that explains the determinants of bargaining power in marriage, to analyze how a remarried couple’s bargaining relationship affects their child investment in stepfamilies. Based on this theoretical model, I build and estimate an empirical model that investigates the determinants of parental investment. As evidence of parental preference for biological children over stepchildren, I find that an increased wage rate of a biological mother significantly improves her child investment when her husband is a stepfather of the child, while there is no such effect for mothers living with the biological father of the child.

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Notes

  1. One can divide l i into leisure and home production time. However, for simplicity, I assume that l i includes both leisure and home production time. The results of my theoretical study will not change by this simplification. For the empirical application, I do not observe the distinction between the individual’s leisure and home production time.

  2. Although there are no closed-form analytical solutions for this bargaining problem, the first-order conditions for this utility-maximization problem indicates that the optimal allocations of child-care consumption, c w , and time spent outside of work, l i , are determined by the wage rates and non-labor income of the spouses.

  3. The measure has been used throughout North America, in South America (including the Caribbean), in several European and Asian countries, in Australia, and in at least two African nations. It has been used in a wide variety of clinical and research settings and can be used to evaluate the impact of intervention programs. Reviews of research on HOME can be found in Elardo and Bradley (1981), Bradley (1982), Gottfried (1984), Bradley and Caldwell (1988), Bradley (1994), and Bradley et al. (1996).

  4. Under this specification, it is possible to have different classifications for children within the same family. For instance, a child who was born to a remarried couple is classified as being in an intact family, while his or her stepsiblings from his parents’ previous marriages are classified as being in a stepfamily. This may limit my study from distinguishing between the effect of being raised by a traditional married couple who never divorced and the effect of being raised by biological parents who have children of their previous marriages, i.e., being in a blended family. However, the development of more detailed family specifications is beyond the scope of this paper.

  5. However, the percentage of single mothers in the NLSY79 is comparable to that of the 2000 US Census.

  6. In my empirical analysis, I used the standard score divided by its standard deviation in the sample in order to interpret the results easily.

  7. The chi-squared test statistic with 13 degrees of freedom is 118.43.

  8. The marginal effect of the mother’s wage is calculated as 0.108–0.007 * 6.97.

  9. This range was calculated by the method for the marginal effect of the mother’s wage rate described in footnote 8.

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  1. RTI Health Solutions, 200 Park Offices Drive, Research Triangle Park, NC, USA

    Naoko Akashi-Ronquest

  2. California State University, Fullerton, 800 N. State College Blvd, Fullerton, CA, USA

    Naoko Akashi-Ronquest

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Correspondence to Naoko Akashi-Ronquest.

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Akashi-Ronquest, N. The impact of biological preferences on parental investments in children and step-children. Rev Econ Household 7, 59–81 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-008-9042-5

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