Is Parental Love Colorblind? Allocation of Resources within Mixed-Race Families (Preliminary Version) |
Prepared for the Labor and Population Workshop,
Department of Economics, Yale University
May, 2007
53 pages
Marcos A. Rangel, Assistant Professor
Harris School of Public Policy Studies
University of Chicago
Recent studies have shown that differences in wage-determinant skills between blacks and whites are likely to emerge during a child’s infancy. These findings highlight the role of parental investment decisions and suggest that differences in labor income tend to persist across generations, either because minority parents are limited in their choices, or because they have relatively negative expectations regarding the rewards attached to investments in skills. Exploring the genetics of skin-color determination and the widespread incidence of mixed-race families in Brazil, I present evidence that, controlling for observed and unobserved parental characteristics, light-skinned children are more likely to receive investments in formal education than their dark-skinned siblings. Even though not denying the importance of borrowing constraints (or other ancestry effects), this suggests that parental expectations regarding differences in the return to human capital investments may play an independent role on the persistence of earnings differentials.
Read the entire working paper here or here.
Tags: Marcos A. Rangel