【主讲】易君健 (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
【主题】Early health shocks, parental responses, and child outcomes
【时间】2011年3月24日 (周四) 15：30-17：00
【地点】上海财经大学经济学院楼801室
【语言】英文
【摘要】This paper studies how early health shocks affect the child's human capital formation. We first formulate a theoretical model to understand how early health shocks affect child outcomes through parental responses. We nest a dynamic model of human capability formation into a standard intra household resource allocation framework. By introducing the multidimensionality of child endowments, we allow parents to compensate and reinforce along different dimensions. We then test our main empirical predictions using a Chinese child twins survey, which contains detailed information on child- and parent-specific expenditures. We can differentiate between investments in money and investments in time. On the one hand, we find evidence of compensating investment in child health but of reinforcing investment in education. On the other hand, we find no change in the time spent with the child. We confirm that an early health insult negatively affects the child under several different domains, ranging from later health, to cognition, and then to personality. Our findings suggest caution in interpreting reduced-form estimates of the effects of early-life shocks. In the presence of asymmetric parental responses under different dimensions of the child's human capital, they cannot even be unambiguously interpreted as upper or lower bounds of the biological effects.
