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Children’s and parents’ time use: empirical evidence on investment in human capital in France, Germany and Italy

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Abstract

We model time allocation choices by youngsters into activities related to the acquisition of human capital: study time, but also socialization, which can enhance personal interaction skills. Using multi-member household time use micro data, we run fractional regression and double hurdle models, providing new empirical evidence for France, Germany and Italy on the link between time allocation by parents and by youngsters, a channel disregarded in the literature on parental investment in children. Our results on the association between parents’ and children’s time use are consistent with different mechanisms: parental role model, intergenerational transmission of preferences, or network effects.

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Notes

  1. We have used the dataset version 5.5.2. This document presents results drawn from the MTUS Study, but the interpretation of this data and other views expressed in this text are those of the author. This text does not necessarily represent the views of the MTUS team or any agency which has contributed data to the MTUS archive. The author bears full responsibility for all errors and omissions in the interpretation of the MTUS data.

  2. See the MTUS documentation at http://www.timeuse.org/mtus/documentation/.

  3. Data on secondary activities are also collected by some time use surveys. Secondary activity is an activity that is executed at the same time as another (the primary), and is reported as secondary by the respondents, such as reading as primary activity and listening to music as secondary activity.

  4. To avoid engaging in a redundant discussion of patterns already commented upon for weekdays, we highlight in the text the major similarities and differences with respect to the weekday analysis. For France and Italy, only one diary per person exists in the original data, whereas for Germany there are 2 week day diaries per person in the MTUS data. To avoid throwing away half the time diary for Germany and to keep the cross-country comparability, we have taken the average of the 2 week days for the MTUS German data. The analysis of Sundays only includes information for a single day for the three countries.

  5. The selection of activities to be included was constrained by data comparability (see Table 10 in the appendix).

  6. Though mothers in Germany devote more time to TV watching on Sundays than in France.

  7. The analysis for Sundays is available upon request.

  8. In models of expenditure, the second part is typically a truncated regression. In health economics there are many applications of two part models where the dependent variables is a count measure describing the use of medical services (see for example Deb and Trivedi (2002)).

  9. We cannot relax this stringent assumption due to the limited information set we have in our data. Estimation of a correlation coefficient would require some exclusion restrictions, to prevent identification from relying only on functional form. We tried the latter approach and experimented convergence problems in the estimation in many cases. However, when convergence was achieved, the hypothesis of no correlation between the two equations could not be rejected.

  10. The resulting model is used by Ramalho and Silva (2009) to explain the capital structure decisions of firms (first part: to issue or not debt; second part: how much debt to issue).

  11. The full set of estimation results of the fractional logit model and the double hurdle model is available upon request.

  12. The non linear models estimated allow the marginal effect of parents’ time use to depend on youngster’s gender. We also experimented with a specification including the interaction of youngster’s gender with parents’ time use variables, which turned out not to be significant.

  13. Even though in France the significance of the impact of the father’s allocation of time is not robust to the introduction of controls for the mother’s allocation of time.

  14. For the sake of comparison with most time use applications, we also estimated tobit specifications for the same models and found similar results in terms of significance and sign of the estimated marginal effects.

  15. We do not undertake specific modeling to try to disentangle the two mechanisms.

  16. This difficulty is common in the literature on parental inputs and children outcomes. See the discussion in Sect. 1.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Dan Hamermesh for initial comments that led to the idea of working on this paper during the IZA Topic Week “Non market time in economics”. We want to acknowledge helpful suggestions from Suzanne Bianchi, Rachel Connelly, the participants to the XXVIII IATUR Conference, the XXII ESPE Conference, the Department of Economics Seminar at ISEG, the JESS seminar at ISER. We greatly benefited from stimulating discussions with Elena Bardasi, Daniele Fabbri, Margherita Fort, Paulo Gomes, Andrea Ichino and Robert Pollak and from the extended comments of the Editor and two anonymous referees.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Economic Analysis (CSIC) and IZA Bonn, Campus UAB, 08193, Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain

    Ana Rute Cardoso

  2. ISEG Department of Economics, Technical University of Lisbon, Rua Miguel Lupi, 20, 1249-078, Lisbon, Portugal

    Elsa Fontainha

  3. Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche, Università di Bologna, CHILD Torino and IZA Bonn, Piazza Scaravilli 2, 40126, Bologna, Italy

    Chiara Monfardini

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  1. Ana Rute Cardoso
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  2. Elsa Fontainha
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  3. Chiara Monfardini
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Correspondence to Chiara Monfardini.

Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 9, 10, 11, and 12.

Table 9 Sample sizes—week day and Sunday
Full size table
Table 10 Activity contents for the variables: studying and reading, socializing and TV watching
Full size table
Table 11 Time use variables definition and descriptive statistics—week day
Full size table
Table 12 Description of additional covariates used in regression analysis—week day
Full size table

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Cardoso, A.R., Fontainha, E. & Monfardini, C. Children’s and parents’ time use: empirical evidence on investment in human capital in France, Germany and Italy. Rev Econ Household 8, 479–504 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-010-9090-5

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