Maternal employment and overweight children: an Australian study
Anna Zhu
Social Policy Research Centre
Contact Email: anna.zhu
unsw.edu.au
The alarming rise in the number of overweight children in developed nations during a trend of increasing rates of female participation in the labour force has raised concerns about whether longer hours in employment (and away from the child) contributes to poorer health outcomes for children. This paper explores this relationship for Australia using the first wave of data from the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Children (LSAC). However, this paper goes beyond using traditional controls in regression analysis and shows that there are statistically significant sources of unobservable heterogeneity which can underestimate the impact of maternal employment on child obesity, if unaccounted for. More specifically, it argues that the self-selection bias effect is not uniform across different employment loads, that is, the unobservable factors that influence some mothers to choose full-time employment are different to the unobservable factors which influence other mothers to choose part-time work or to not join the labour force. This paper therefore, contributes to the literature by raising awareness of this issue and adopting an econometric method which efficiently addresses it.
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