Volume 12, Number 1 (Winter) 1977
Rosenzweig, Mark R. 1977. "Farm-Family Schooling Decisions: Determinants of the Quantity and Quality of Education in Agricultural Populations." Journal of Human Resources 12(1):71-91.
To investigate the differential school enrollment and expenditure behavior of farm and nonfarm populations revealed in a number of empirical studies, an intertemporal model of farm-family schooling decisions is formulated in which the roles of education in agricultural production are explicitly considered and in which the productivity of children can be augmented by increasing either the quantity or quality of schooling. Results obtained from fitting the empirical specification of the theoretical framework to U.S. state-level data show that the participation of farm children in agricultural production affects significantly the demand for the quality and quantity of schooling in rural-farm areas. In particular, increasing factor inputs other than child labor reduces the enrollment rate of farm teenagers but increases educational expenditures such that the overall quality of farm children rises.
The author is Assistant Professor of Economics, Yale University. I am grateful to James L. McCabe, Jean-Claude Koeune, T. Paul Schultz, Linda N. Edwards, the editor, and anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. A portion of the research underlying the paper was funded by NICHD grant IR01 HD08687-01.
© 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X