The Role of Maternal Cognitive Ability in Child Health

The literature on child health suggests mother`s schooling is a key determinant of child health. Little is known of how other sources of maternal human capital contribute to her children`s health. This paper investigates the differential returns on child health of three sources of maternal human capital: schooling, cognitive ability and childhood background. Conditional on schooling and mother`s height, we first analyze the effect of maternal cognitive ability on her children`s health. Next, we relax the assumption of mother`s schooling and reasoning ability as predetermined variables and study the extent to which both returns reflect observed mother`s childhood endowments. We conclude by investigating the importance of mother`s schooling and cognitive ability in enhancing her offspring`s health during first-time motherhood. Results show maternal cognitive ability is an important factor in improving her children`s health. We find these returns robust to the inclusion of mother`s observed childhood endowments. However, estimates of mother`s schooling drop by 30 percent when we control for these variables. This suggests that unlike mother`s schooling, maternal returns to cognitive ability on child health are less likely to reflect mother`s childhood background. Finally, we find maternal reasoning ability to be an important factor in improving her children`s health in first-time motherhood. Our analysis is based on information gathered in the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS-1), which administered Raven`s Colored Progressive Matrices, and collected anthropometric outcomes. Our results focus on child height-for-age (0-17 years) z-scores as long-run health outcomes.

Gender equity and computer use

The literature review shows that gender inequality in computer use exists today. The inequality begins at birth with society giving boys and girl\u27s roles that they have to play. One possible solution to gender inequality in computer use is to put a gender equity program in place at public schools. Such a program would have to be woven into teaching practices and school activities to strengthen girls\u27 confidence and their ability to achieve in computers

Schooling Inequality among the Indigenous: A Problem of Resources or Language Barriers?

Using large household data sets from rural Mexican communities, where a majority of indigenous people live, we analyze the potential explanatory factors for low educational attainment of indigenous children. We find that, overall, indigenous children fare worse than their non-indigenous classmates. Nevertheless, there is important heterogeneity within the indigenous group. In particular, monolingual indigenous children (those who speak only an indigenous language) perform much worse in school than bilingual indigenous children who speak Spanish as a second language.