Effects of Maternal Employment on Adolescent Behavior and Academic Outcomes: Evidence from Japanese Micro Data

This paper examines the short-term and long-term effects of maternal employment on adolescent children’s outcomes, namely, on behavior and grades at school and on total years of education. Because a mother’s decision to work depends heavily on her husband’s socioeconomic characteristics in Japan, IV methods were employed to deal with this self-selection problem. The results show that maternal full-time employment itself does not hinder adolescents’ human capital development. Rather, maternal full-time work prevents sons from smoking at school, although the path of this phenomenon should be carefully examined with more detailed data. Effects of maternal employment are not observed for sons’ or daughters’ educational attainment after controlling for family and school characteristics.