Leight, Jessica
Email Address
ORCID
Disciplines
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Publication Sibling Rivalry: Ability and Intrahousehold Allocation in Gansu Province, China(2015-03-01) Leight, JessicaThis paper evaluates the strategies employed by households in rural China to allocate educational expenditure to children of different physical endowments, examining whether parents use educational funding to reinforce or compensate for these differences. Climatic shocks are employed as an instrument for endowment, measured as height-for-age, allowing for the identification of the impact of quasi-exogenous variation in endowment on parental allocations conditional on household fixed effects. The results suggest that educational expenditure is directed to the relatively weaker child; in response to the mean differences in height-for-age be- tween siblings, parents redirect around 25% of discretionary educational spending to the child with lower height-for-age, and this effect is robust to the potentially confounding effects of gender and birth order. There is some evidence that time allocation may also be a relevant margin of compensation, but no evidence that medical expenditure responds to differences in height-for-age.Publication Maternal bargaining power, parental compensation and non-cognitive skills in rural China(2015-11-01) Leight, Jessica; Liu, ElaineThe importance of non-cognitive skills in determining long-term human capital and labor market outcomes is widely acknowledged, but relatively little is known about how non-cognitive skills may shape educational investments by parents early in life. This paper evaluates the parental response to variation in non-cognitive skills among their children in rural Gansu province, China, employing a household fixed effects specification. The results suggest that on average, parents invest no more in terms of educational expenditure in children who have better non-cognitive skills relative to their siblings. However, there is significant heterogeneity with respect to maternal education; less educated mothers appear to reinforce differences in non-cognitive skills between their children, while more educated mothers compensate for these differences. The evidence is consistent with this pattern corresponding to greater bargaining power for more educated mothers and different preferences for compensation among more educated women. In addition, there is evidence that these compensatory investments lead to catch-up in non-cognitive skills over time for children of more educated mothers.Publication The Impact of Early Childhood Rainfall Shocks on the Evolution of Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills(2015-10-01) Leight, Jessica; Glewwe, Paul; Park, AlbertThis paper is the first to estimate the extent to which early childhood climatic shocks affect both cognitive and non-cognitive skills as measured at multiple points in childhood and adolescence. We assess the impact of rainfall observed in utero and during the first two years of life by analyzing a rich longitudinal study of rural youth in a poor province in China. Our empirical strategy entails estimating the impact of rainfall on various measures of cognitive and non-cognitive skills utilizing a reduced form strategy, conditional on county and year-of-birth fixed effects. The results indicate that there is a significant impact of early shocks, particularly shocks in utero and in the first year of life, on cognitive skills, but that this impact may be declining over time. There is little evidence of any impact on non-cognitive skills. We also present evidence that the declining salience of early shocks is consistent with compensatory strategies employed by parents.