Influence of parental employment status on Dutch and Slovak adolescents' health

BACKGROUND: Recent research shows the possibility that the link between parental employment status and children's health can be affected by different cultural or societal settings. The aim of this study was to explore whether the effect of father's and mother's employment status on several aspects of adolescents' health differs between Slovakia and the Netherlands. METHODS: Two data sets were used: 2616 Slovak adolescents (mean age 14.9) and 2054 Dutch adolescents (mean age 16.3). Self-rated health, GHQ-12, long-term well-being and Rosenberg self-esteem scale were used to assess the health of adolescents. Parental employment status was classified into the following categories: employed, unemployed, disabled, housewife (among mothers only). Logistic regression analyses were done separately for males and females. RESULTS: Results indicate that having an unemployed father negatively influences self-rated health and long-term well-being of Slovak male adolescents, but has no effect on the health of Dutch adolescents. Secondly, having a disabled father has a negative effect on the psychological well-being of Dutch males and the self-rated health of females, but does not influence the health of Slovak adolescents. Thirdly, having a mother who is disabled, unemployed or a housewife has a negative effect on the self-esteem of Slovak adolescents. Fourthly, Dutch males whose mother was a housewife had worse long-term well-being than those with an unemployed mother, whereas Dutch females whose mother was a housewife reported better psychological well-being than those with an employed mother. CONCLUSION: To conclude briefly our results, father's unemployment seems to be a better predictor of health for Slovak adolescents, father's disablement of health for Dutch ones. Mother's employment status seemed to be important for the self-esteem of Slovak adolescents and mother as a housewife for the health of Dutch ones. This suggests that the link between parental employment status and the health of their children may vary between countries, and therefore further studies involving various cultures are needed

Learning in Coordination Games

Program year: 1992/1993Digitized from print original stored in HDRProblems exist when a game contains multiple Nash equilibria. A number of selection principles have been suggested to deal with these problems. Vincent Crawford's dynamic theory is one recent proposal on how to do this for order statistic games. In this paper, two of Crawford's propositions will be examined. The first asserts that if the initial actions and the group size are held constant, an increase in the order statistic will bring about a statistical increase in the values of the players' actions and in the value of the summary statistic. The other deals with changes in the group size, stating that holding the initial actions and the order statistic constant, increasing the group size will result in a decrease in the values of the players' actions and in the value of the order statistic. Sections II through IV contain background information. Section V introduces Crawford's theory. Section VI discusses the experimental design and VII the experimental results. Conclusions are provided in section VIII

Health effects on children's willingness to compete

The formation of human capital is important for a society's welfare and economic success. Recent literature shows that child health can provide an important explanation for disparities in children’s human capital development across different socio-economic groups. While this literature focuses on cognitive skills as determinants of human capital, it neglects non-cognitive skills. We analyze data from economic experiments with preschoolers and their mothers to investigate whether child health can explain developmental gaps in children’s non-cognitive skills. Our measure for children’s noncognitive skills is their willingness to compete with others. Our findings suggest that health problems are negatively related to children’s willingness to compete and that the effect of health on competitiveness differs with socio-economic background. Health has a strongly negative effect in our sub-sample with low socioeconomic background, whereas there is no effect in our sub-sample with high socio-economic background

Does Quality of Early Childhood Education and Care Affect the Home Learning Environment of Children?

Both, a high quality of the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) setting and a high quality of the home learning environment foster children's development. However, we know little about the interactions between ECEC quality and the home learning environment. We examine whether the child's attendance in a high ECEC quality setting improves the quality of her home learning environment. We use very rich data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD), which provides detailed panel information through children's age of 6 months to 9 years on ECEC quality and on the child's home learning environment. Our analysis is based on a sample of 700 children who have been in non-family child care for at least 10 hours/week. We estimate level and value-added specifications and show that ECEC quality improves the home learning environment at various measurement points. The effects sizes indicate that an increase in ECEC quality by one standard deviation increases the home learning environment by about 0.08 standard deviations. Furthermore, results differ by sub-groups: The home learning environment from more advantaged children benefits more from higher ECEC quality. Thus the potential of high ECEC quality on the home learning environment is not effectively used for disadvantaged children. Policies could work on this potential link, in particular