August Bruno

Job market paper

Parenting Decisions and Child Skill Development

I develop and estimate a dynamic model of child cognitive and non-cognitive skill development in a Markov Perfect Equilibrium framework, where both parents and children play an active role in the child skill development process. Children choose how much of their time to allocate toward studying, while their parents make time allocation decisions, and decide whether to adopt an authoritarian, authoritative, or permissive parenting style. Each parenting style influences child skill development through two channels, they augment child study time decisions, and have a direct (potentially negative) impact on cognitive and non-cognitive skills. I use the estimated model parameters to show that an authoritative parenting style is best at increasing child cognitive and non-cognitive skills, while a permissive parenting style is typically the worst. This provides evidence that the distinction between these non-authoritarian parenting styles is important to consider in the economics literature.