Supporting working mothers to balance their work and childcare responsibilities is a central objective of maternal and parental leave policies. Nearly all countries offer some forms of maternity and family leave programs for childbearing on a national basis. This chapter reviews various types of...

The relationship between physical activity and child health and development is well-documented, yet the extant literature provides limited causal insight into the amount of physical activity considered optimal for improving any given health or developmental outcome. This paper exploits exogenous...

Little is known about the response behavior of parents whose children are exposed to an early-life shock. In this paper we interpret the prenatal exposure of the Austrian 1986 cohort to radioactive fallout from the Chernobyl accident as a negative human capital shock and examine their parents...

"The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings; and of that capital the most precious part is the result of the care and influence of the mother" Alfred Marshall 1890.Despite Marshall's early recognition of the importance of mothering, modern day human capital theory scarcely...

Early life shocks result in physiological changes that allow infants and children to adapt to surrounding environments. We examine the implications of one form of biological adaptation - immune system learning - for human capital formation. Using two case studies, where interventions to reduce...

A child’s disability increases childcare demands causing two opposing effects on the mother’s labor supply: while some types of disability require additional time spent reducing labor supply, othersrequire additional expenses increasing labor supply. This paper studies the effect of a...

Using the 2003â⠬â 2019 American Time Use Survey, we examine how living with a parent who has a work-limiting disability is related to teenagers' time allocation. For girls, we find that living with a disabled parent is associated with less time spent on educational activities, including...

We show that children who are born at or just before the weekend are less likely to be breastfed, owing to poorer breastfeeding support services in hospitals at weekends. We use this variation to estimate the effect of breastfeeding on children's development in the first five years of life, for...

Birth weight is an important aspect of public health which has been linked to increased risk of infant death, increased cost of care, and a range of later life outcomes. Using data from a new Irish cohort study, I document the relationship between birth weight and socioeconomic status. A strong...

We show that children who are born at the weekend or just before are less likely to be breastfed, owing to poorer breastfeeding support services at weekends. We use this variation to estimate the effect of breastfeeding on children's development for a sample of uncomplicated births from low...