Ha Trong Nguyen

Parental health and children's cognitive and noncognitive development: New evidence from the longitudinal survey of Australian children

This paper examines the effects of parental health on cognitive and noncognitive development in Australian children. The underlying nationally representative panel data and a child fixed effects estimator are used to deal with unobserved heterogeneity. We find that only fathers serious mental illness worsens selected cognitive and noncognitive skills of children. Maternal poor health also deteriorates some cognitive and noncognitive outcomes of children of lone mothers only. Our results demonstrate that either failing to account for parent-child fixed effects or using child noncognitive skills reported by parents could overestimate the harmful impact of poor parental health on child development.

The Impact of Maternal Mental Health Shocks on Child Health: Estimates from Fixed Effects Instrumental Variables Models for Two Cohorts of Australian Children

This paper contributes to an emerging body of literature on intergenerational transmission in health by presenting the causal estimates on the impact of maternal mental health shocks on child health. The potential endogeneity of maternal mental health shocks is dealt with by utilizing nationally representative panel data from two cohorts and individual fixed-effects instrumental variables models. While our results show that poor maternal mental health does not affect childrens general health, asthma morbidity, or anthropometric measures, our results indicate that children of depressed mothers do need extra medical care. For this child health outcome, higher adverse impact is found for boys, younger children, children of mothers with lower education, and children in lower-income households. We also find that children of depressed mothers are more likely to have food or digestive allergies and tonsillitis incidence. Our study demonstrates that failing to account for endogeneity of maternal mental health shocks could overestimate the harmful impact of poor maternal mental health on child health. Our findings are robust to a battery of sensitivity and specification tests.

The Dynamics of Informal Care Provision in an Australian Household Panel Survey: Previous Work Characteristics and Future Care Provision

This study contributes to a small literature on the dynamics of informal care by examining the informal care provision choices of working age Australians. We focus on the impact of previous work characteristics (including work security and flexibility) on subsequent care provision decisions and distinguish between care that is provided to people who cohabit and people who reside elsewhere, as well as between the provision of care as the primary caregiver, or in a secondary caring role. Our dynamic framework of informal care provision accounts for state-dependence, unobserved heterogeneity and initial conditions. For both males and females, we find the existence of positive state-dependence in all care states in both the short- and medium-term. Furthermore, the inertia in care provision appears to be stronger for more intensive care. We also find previous employment status has a significant deterrent effect on current care provision decisions. The effects on employment, however, differ according to the type of previous work, the type of care currently provided, and the gender of the caregiver. We also find that workers with perceptions of greater job security are nevertheless less likely to provide subsequent care. Our results also suggest that workers’ perceptions about work flexibility and their stated overall satisfaction with work actually have no impact on their subsequent decisions to provide care in any capacity.

The Efficiency of Australian Schools: A Nationwide Analysis Using Gains in Test Scores of Students as Outputs

This study examines the efficiency of schools in Australia and its determinants using the gain in NAPLAN test scores of students in 6,774 schools in 2009-2011. The results show that, based on empirical input-output combinations, the growth of NAPLAN test scores in Australian schools could be improved by 64 per cent by learning from best practice, on average. At the primary level, Catholic and independent schools are less efficient than public schools. At the secondary school level, though, public schools are found to be less efficient than other (non-public) schools.