Abstract
This chapter investigates the effect of the aspiration of parents for children’s education on human capital accumulation and fertility. We investigate why educational performance in a country is higher than those in the others.
This chapter is based on Yakita (2012).
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Notes
- 1.
Lee and Barro (2001) showed that school resources such as the pupil-teacher ratio are also negatively related to school performance even when the East Asian dummy is included. The relationship between school resources and student performance still seems controversial (e.g., Hanushek and Kimko 2000; Card 2001).
- 2.
It is also well documented that in Asian societies such as those in South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan, the private sector plays a significant role in university education, and that most student’s parents pay their children’s tuition fees (e.g., OECD 2002).
- 3.
In Korea the peaks were 20–24 and 45–49 and in Japan 20–24 and 40–44, respectively, in 2000 (ILO 2002). The reason for the delay of the peaks may be attributed to the delay of marriage and the birth of the first child.
- 4.
The 70.3 % of working women age 35–44 who had full-time jobs before having their first child (and they quit their jobs), but who re-entered the workforce after rearing their children had only part-time jobs, with the wage rate being only 67 % of the wage rate of average full-time workers in Japan in 2000 (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan 2001). The ratio of women who worked before having the first child was 70.7% in 2005–2007, only 38.0% of them continued working and the remainder (62%) quitted their jobs (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare of Japan 2011). Therefore, child-rearing (including educational support) still seems to have negative long-term effects on the human capital formation of mothers in Japan. In contrast, this may not be the case in most developed Western countries; for example, Gupta and Smith (2002) show that there is no indication that rearing children had any long-term negative effects on the earning potential of their mothers in Denmark during 1980–1995.
- 5.
Our analysis and conclusion are not altered essentially even if we assume a constant working time in the first adulthood period.
- 6.
When \( \alpha =1 \), the model grows endogenously, and the balanced growth rate is given by ϕ(β, δ; ε, γ, z). However, our conclusion essentially holds, replacing steady-state levels of human capital stock with balanced-growth rates.
- 7.
If \( 2\varepsilon \le 1 \), we have \( \beta +\varepsilon <1 \) from the assumption \( \varepsilon >\beta \). In this case, the utility weight of consumption can not be zero.
- 8.
By setting \( \partial \phi /\partial \beta =0 \) in (10.11), we obtain a quadratic equation of β. Figure 10.1 is obtained by setting \( \varepsilon =0.65 \), \( \gamma =0.4 \), \( T=120 \), \( z=18 \), \( \theta =1 \) and \( \alpha =0.5 \). Three curves in the upper part are for \( \delta =0.8 \), \( \delta \hbox{'}=0.6 \) and \( \delta "=0.4 \). See also Table 10.1.
Table 10.1 Numerical example - 9.
When \( z\beta /\left(\varepsilon -\beta \right)<1 \), the utility from education is negative, and an increase in the utility weight β lowers the utility from a given level of education. Since our purpose is to consider the trade-off between the utilities from education and consumption (or the number of children), this chapter concentrates on the range of positive utility levels from education.
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Yakita, A. (2017). Parental Education, Fertility, and Economic Development. In: Population Aging, Fertility and Social Security. Population Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47644-5_10
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