MOTHER’S EDUCATION AND THE INTERGENERATIONAL

TRANSMISSION OF HUMAN CAPITAL: EVIDENCE FROM

COLLEGE OPENINGS (JANET CURRIE AND ENRICO MORETTI )
• Introduction
•
 SOME WORDS:-

• County - Made of cities in united state

• Cohort-All women’s have same characteristic.
• Two year and four year college –Graduation college education system in US.
• Parity-birth order
• Vital statistics natality-System of sharing data in the united states
 INTRODUCTI
ON
• Wages understate the social benefit due to intergenerational spillover effect.
• Intergenerational spillover Effect:-Maternal Education Healthier children more productive more highly educated .

• We examine the effect of maternal education on birth outcomes using Vital Statistics Natality data for 1970 to 1999(In the
united states).

• Analysis the channels through which maternal education may improve birth outcomes.
• Four channels :
• 1.Prenatal care
• 2.Marriage
• 3.Smoking
• 4.Fertility
 ENDOGENEITY
• Account for endogeneity of educational attainment in maternal education (Independent variable).
• Reasons:
• 1.Omitted variable bias due to family background or forward looking behaviour.
• 2.Casuality Effect due to higher earning of fathers and reading newspaper.
• Solving for Endogeneity:-
• Instrumental variable strategy :- IV-Availability of college opening in the women’s county in her 17 thyear.
• Control for many potentially unobserved confounding factors by including county-year-of-birth fixed effects.
• Our estimates are identified by differences in the availability of educational services among different cohorts of
women delivering in the same county and year.
• Several Evidence for college openings do in fact increase educational attainments.
• 1. No clear trend in the ten years before the college opening.
• 2. Mother’s seventeenth year increases her educational attainment, openings in her twenty-fifth or later years do
not .
• 3. The opening of four-year colleges increases four-year graduation rates.
• 4. When male-only colleges become coed, maternal education increases, but when female-only colleges become
coed, no effect on women’s education.
• 5. The opening of public colleges has a larger effect than the opening of private colleges.

• Increases in wages may significantly understate the total return.

 HOW MATERNAL EDUCATION MAY EFFECT BIRTH OUTCOME

• 1.Changing the household budget constraint.

• 2.Inducing mother’s to have healthier behaviour.
• 3.Effect on fertility

1. Changing the Household budget constraint:-

 Direct-More educated women have higher earnings.
 Indirect-Improve the women’s marriage market.
• 2.Healthier behaviour:-Education may reduce the probability of smoking holding budget constraint.
• 3.Fertility:-Negative relation between women’s education and their fertility.
Measures of birth outcome-birth weight or gestational age
• Effects of Low birth weight (Less than 2500 grams) and Premature (Less than 37 weeks )
.Higher risk of death than other infants.
.Future cognitive effect –Long term negative effect on test score, employment probabilities ,wages.

External benefit of education:-

• Increased productivity
• Reduced crime rates
• Improved political behaviour
 Data
• Individual level vital statistics natality data from 1970 to 1990.
• Birth certificate for all births.

• Report the mother’s education, information about when she began prenatal care during pregnancy, whether she
smoked during pregnancy, marital status, information about the fathers’ education, and information about birth
outcomes including birth weight and gestational age.
• Data limitation:- Include only first birth and Analysis only for white mother’s.
• first-time mothers 24 to 45 years old-10 percent random sample of the full sample of women.
• Tremendous rise in the number of colleges between 1940 and 1996.
• Two year college more expansion than 4 year college and more s shaped than 4 year college.
• Measures of availability of 2 year college = No. of college existed in the women’s county when she was 17th years
old /Estimated no. of 18-22 years old in that country.
• Account for capacity –
Availability of classroom space or capital expenditure .
• Enrollment might be obtainable .
• Enrollment reflects both the supply of college places and the demand for these places, and thus is not a valid
instrument.
• Limitation:-We observe the mother’s residence at the time of the birth of the baby , rather than at the time when she
was 17th.
• Reason for this limitation:-Young women have high mobility rates .
IDENTIFICATION-
OUR FIRST-STAGE MODEL TAKES THE FORM

• IV-2 and IV-4 denote instrumental variables for two and four-year colleges.
• AGE is the year of maternal age.
• (1)COUNTYYEARBRTH is a vector of indicators for the county and year of the child’s birth.
• INCOME17 and URBAN17 control for the median income and the percent urban in the county when women 17 and u is a
random error term.
• The county/year effects control for many characteristics of the local area that may affect outcomes, such as the availability and
quality of medical services, the local business cycle, pollution, etc.
• Identification in our models comes from the fact that “within each county and year of birth of the baby, there are mothers who
were seventeen before a college opening and mothers who were seventeen after a college opening”.
• The income and urbanicity measures control for some of the factors likely to affect the educational attainment of the mother’s
cohort (such as economic growth and development)
IN THE SECOND STAGE, WE REGRESS AN OUTCOME VARIABLE ON THE PREDICTED
YEARS OF EDUCATION FROM (1) AND ALL THE EXOGENOUS COVARIATES

• PEDUC is the predicted years of education from (2), and z is a random error.

• By including county year-of child’s-birth effects, we absorb the effect of these geographical factors on birth
outcomes, and in this sense, we underestimate the benefit of schooling.

• Analysis on Location and Impact of College Openings

• WE address several concerns below-
• 1-Comparing the impact of new colleges on the completion rates of two and four-year
degrees: If a new four-year college affects both degree completion rates equally, it might indicate
the college was established where education was increasing anyway.
• 2- If identification is valid- If college availability at 17 predicts educational attainment more than
availability at 25, it supports the identification.
• 3-Public versus private college openings: If our analysis is correct, public college openings
should have a bigger impact, as women from disadvantaged backgrounds likely attend these.
• 4- Effects of single-sex colleges becoming coed: Male-only colleges turning coed should increase
women's access to education, but female-only colleges may reduce access due to overcrowding.
• 5- Impact of new colleges in areas with few versus many existing colleges: We expect new
college openings to have a greater effect in regions with fewer existing colleges.
FIGURE II –
AVERAGE BIRTH OUTCOMES, BEFORE AND AFTER THE OPENING OF A FOUR-
YEAR COLLEGE—MOTHER IS 17 WHEN THE COLLEGE OPENS

• In both figures, time 0 is when the college opens and the mother
is 17 years old.
• The top panel shows the conditional probability of low birth weight in
the years preceding and the years following the college opening. The
bottom panel shows the probability of premature birth in the years
preceding and following the college opening.

• There is a drop in the incidence of these negative outcomes following the

opening.
FIGURE- III - AVERAGE BIRTH OUTCOMES, BEFORE AND AFTER
THE OPENING OF A FOUR-YEAR COLLEGE—MOTHER IS 25 WHEN
THE COLLEGE OPENS
• In both figures, time 0 is when the college opens and the
mother is 25 years old.

• Figure III is like Figure II, but considers college

openings occur when the mother is 25, rather
than 17 seventeen.
• Result- As expected, Most women should be
unaffected by a college opening that occurs past
their college age. As expected, these later
openings have no clear effect on outcomes.
 ADDITIONAL SPECIFICATION TEST
 In this section, we will discuss additional specification test which has been mentioned in section IV.
 These additional specifications provide evidences that college openings is actually a good instrument for maternal
education.
 In our discussion, we will talk about following points:
• 1.Separate estimates of four-year public and private colleges opening and its effect.
• 2. Transformations of single-sex colleges to coed.
• 3. Whether a new collage have greater effect on maternal education in areas with less collages and,
 ADDITIONAL SPECIFICATION TEST

 In this section, we will discuss additional specification test which has been mentioned in section
IV.
 These additional specifications provide evidences that college openings is actually a good
instrument for maternal education.
 In our discussion, we will talk about following points:
1. Separate estimates of four-year public and private colleges opening and its effect.
2. Transformations of single-sex colleges to coed.
3. Whether a new collage have greater effect on maternal education in areas with less collages
and,

4. We will talk about endogenous mobility issue that is problematic for instrumental variable.
 PRIVATE COLLEGE VS PUBLIC COLLAGE:

• All two-year collages in the sample are public collage while half of the four-year colleges are public collage.
• If collage openings increase maternal education by reducing cost of attendance then opening of public
collage should have larger effect than private collage.
• Our regression result (in table V, panel 1.) also have the same.
• Effect of a new four-year public collage is four times larger than private collage.
• Finding is in consistent with the hypothesis that private collages are opened in the areas with the higher
expected increase in schooling.
 EFFECT OF TRANSFORMATION OF COLLAGES
FROM SINGLE-SEX TO COED:

• 1. Male-only to coed: Positive effect on maternal education is expected.

• 2. Female-only to coed: No effect or negative effect (crowd out of women) is
expected.
• In the sample, 104 cases were of transformation of four-year collages from male-only
to coed while 84 cases were of female-only to coed.
• Transformation of four-year male-only collages to coed have similar effect as of new
collage openings (table II) while effect of collage change from female only to coed has
smaller and statistically insignificant effect (Table V, panel 2.)
 EFFECT OF A NEW COLLAGE ON MATERNAL EDUCATION WITH
RESPECT TO NUMBER OF EXISTING COLLAGE IN THE
CONTIGUOUS AREAS:

• In this specification, counties are divided into two groups:

1. Counties with number of collages (normalized by cohort size) above median
2. Counties with number of collages below median
• Then these variables are interacted with two- and four-year collage availability.
• Result shows that new four-year collage do affect largely in collage poor areas than collage rich but the difference is
statistically in significant.
• New two-year collage openings affect maternal education more in collage poor areas.
• Results in panel 4 shows that an increase in one four-year collage per 1000 residents of year 18-24, increases maternal
education by almost 1-year of schooling in counties with no collage.
• But the effect falls off rapidly with number of colleges in contiguous areas and falls to zero when no. collages increases
to one.
ISSUE OF ENDOGENOUS MOBILITY:

• Two types of endogenous mobility:

1. Movements for collage attendance (move to county that experience new collage opening)
2. Movements to the county that experience new collage opening after graduation but before first childbirth.
( May be for better opportunities in labor markets and marriage markets that arises from collage openings)
• Evidence in table III indicates that this types of mobility is not very significant.
• First type of potential mobility is very problematic for our IV but due to data limitations, we can not
completely rule out this possibility.
• By various indirect evidences it has been shown that the mobility is not deriving this significant correlation
between maternal education and collage openings.
Indirect Evidences:
1.New collages are unlikely to attract significant number of students from far away.
Ex- For four-year colleges: Examination of data from Integrated Post-secondary Education Data
System of year 1998 that includes data of 2303 collages, suggests that 100 year or older colleges have 1/3
of students of total enrolment from other states while the same is only 9% for 10 year or younger
colleges.
• For two-year colleges, it is even lower.
• This issue is directly addressed by using data from NLSY and 1980 and 1990 5% Public Use Micro
Samples of Census. Both includes residential history of respondents.
• Using information from these two data, Author has estimated different versions of first-stage regression
and compared the estimates with the estimates of Vital Statistics Data regression.
• Results are shown in Table VI.
 CONCLUSION:
• This paper provides evidence regarding the effect of maternal education on infant and on a series of other factors
that are supposed to affect infant health including use of prenatal cares, smoking, marriage, and fertility.
• In this paper, Author has estimated that,
• An additional year of education reduces the incidence of low birth weight by approximately 10% (0.5 percentage
points) and reduces preterm birth by 6% (0.44 percentage points) on average relative to their means (0.049 and
0.069, respectively).
• These effects arise mainly due to change in maternal behavior with the increase in education. Ex: More educated
women take more prenatal cares, reduce smoking etc.
• Other Findings:
1. Increase in women’s education improves marriage market outcome and reduce fertility as well.
2. New college openings increase mothers’ educational attainment (First-stage estimates) by 0.08 year and 0.01
year for four- and two-year colleges respectively for average county (increment in access to higher education).