Empirical Specifications and Results

Empirical Specification

In order to investigate how the share of labor-intensive jobs within a state affects parents’

childcare time, we consider the following regression model for individual i living in state j at year t:

ParentalTimeijt = αXi+ βLaborJobsj+ Timet+ εij (1)

Here, ParentalTime_ijt denotes the parental childcare time, where in our empirical implementation we will consider total childcare time as well as each subcategory of childcare time. LaborJobs_j is our main variable of interest, and it denotes the share of labor intensive jobs within the state the household resides. Xi represents a series of individual characteristics, such as age, parent’s education level, parent’s employment status, marital status, and the number of children within the household. These additional controls are often used in this strand of literature. Finally, we add time dummies, Time_t, to control for potentially different macroeconomic conditions across survey years. The summary statistics for each variables used in the regression model is given in table 4.

Empirical Results

The regression result for equation (1) is given in table 5. As we can see, a state’s share of labor intensive jobs is negatively correlated with parent’s total childcare time. This result holds for both fathers and mothers, and also for both sons and daughters. We argue this result occurs because parents living in states with more labor intensive jobs are less concerned about the need to get very advanced education and go into top schools as their children could still find local jobs relatively easily without a very good degree. As for the other variables, our

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result is generally consistent with existing literature. For example, as in Guryan, Hurst, and Kearney (2008) and Ramsey and Ramsey (2010) we find childcare time increases with parents’ education attainments; parents who participate less in the labor market, either out of labor force, unemployed, or working part-time, spend more time with their children; finally, as in Kimmel and Connelly (2007), parents who have more children spend more childcare time.

We argue that the negative correlation between a state’s share of labor-intensive jobs and childcare time arises because parents are less concerned about their children’s education attainment. To verify this, we compare how a state’s share of labor-intensive jobs affects each subcategory of childcare time, and the results are given in table 6. Note here that since the time spent on these four subcategories may be correlated as they sum up to total childcare time, we use a seeming unrelated regression model (SUR) to estimate the coefficients. As we can see from table 6, although parents usually spend less time on every subcategories of childcare time, the subcategories in which there are significant differences are time on education and time on traveling and waiting: for fathers, they spend significantly less time on children in both of these subcategories, while for mothers they spend significantly less time on traveling and waiting.¹⁰

One might be concerned that our measure for the share of labor-intensive jobs may be inappropriate, so in table 7 we consider our alternative definitions of labor-intensive jobs. We find that our conclusions stated above do not change when we redefine labor intensive jobs as those occupations with top 1/4 or 1/5 scores in physical requirement.

Interestingly, these two subcategories are the ones identified by Ramsey and Ramsey (2010) and Levey (2009) to be most correlated with human capital investment in children, so the results in table 6 seem to provide some support for our hypothesis.

10 We also find a 10% significance level for the coefficient on father’s time spent on daughters in basic care.

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In table 8 we further differentiate parents with different education attainments. From table 8, we see that for fathers, regardless of their education attainments, those in states with abundant labor-intensive jobs spend less time with their children on education and traveling and waiting. However, only highly educated mothers spend less childcare time on traveling and waiting if they live in states with many labor-intensive jobs. This result seems particularly interesting as Ramsey and Ramsey (2010) also find that it is the college-educated mothers that respond the most in childcare time to increased college admission competition since the 1990s.

Finally, in table 9 we investigate how state’s share of labor-intensive jobs affect the childcare time of parents with children of different ages. As we can see from the table, in terms of time on education, fathers usually decrease their involvement when their children are between 0 and 11 years old, while they decrease their involvement in traveling and waiting throughout all children’s age groups. On the other hand, while we also find mothers to spend less time on traveling and waiting across all children’s age groups, in most cases we do not get significant coefficients on time on education. Table 9 suggests that the impact of state’s industry structure on parental childcare time prevails among children of all ages.

V. Conclusion

In this paper, we use the 2003 to 2010 data from the American Time Use Survey to investigate whether a state’s industrial structure is correlated with parents’ childcare time. Our results suggest there is a negative correlation between a state’s share of labor-intensive jobs and parents’ childcare time, and we argue that this occurs because parents living in states with more labor intensive jobs are less worried about their children’s education attainment because their children could still find local jobs relatively easily without a very good degree. We confirm our hypothesis as we see that a state’s share of labor-intensive jobs is especially

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negatively correlated with childcare time on education and traveling and waiting, the two subcategories that are considered to be most correlated with children’s human capital investment. We also find that parents with different education attainments often react similarly to state industrial structure, although there is evidence that highly educated mothers spend less childcare time on traveling and waiting if they live in states with many labor-intensive jobs.

Finally, we find that the effect of state industrial structure on parent’s time spent on children’s education mainly occur among parents with children aged 11 or less, while the effect on childcare time spent on traveling and waiting is pervasive among parents with children of all ages. This result suggests that state industrial structure may affect the human capital investment in children very early on.

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Table 1 Parental Childcare Time (minutes per day)

Father Mother

Son Daughter Son Daughter

Total Parental Time

Difference in time spent on sons and daughters

Difference in time spent on sons and daughters

2.3***

(0.7)

-1.2**

(0.9)

Time on Education

Difference in time spent on sons and daughters

-0.2 (0.2)

0.4 (0.3)

Time on Playing

Difference in time spent on sons and daughters

3.2***

(0.6)

0.4 (0.5)

Time on Traveling and

Waiting

Difference in time spent on sons and daughters

0.2 (0.3)

0.1 (0.4)

No. of Observations 13849 13442 19267 18665 Note：1.Standard errors in parentheses 2. *10% **5%***1%.

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Table 2 Parental Childcare Time by Education Attainments

Father Mother

Parent’s

education <12 12-15 ≧16 <12 12-15 ≧16