Abstract
This paper adapts Mincer’s ideas about informal training, best exemplified by on-the-job training (OJT), to investments that families make in children before formal schooling begins. Like OJT, in-home training (IHT) occurs in informal settings, requires costly time inputs and is complementary with formal schooling. In addition to choosing among home production, leisure and market work, parents also choose which particular home activities to pursue. That working mothers dramatically reduce the time they devote to leisure, sleep, and other home activities in order to preserve their time in human capital-building activities with children, illustrates and validates the home production framework.
I am very grateful to Shoshana Grossbard for her comments on this paper and for organizing the July 2002 Conference in Honor of Jacob Mincer’s 80th Birthday, at which this paper was originally presented. I also want to thank Robert Michael, Neal Halfon, Daniel Hamermesh, and Solomon Polachek, for very useful discussions of this paper. Remaining errors are, of course, the author’s own. I gratefully acknowledge support from the National Institute of Mental Health, grant # R03 MH61685. I particularly want to thank Jacob Mincer for introducing me, and a generation of other students, to the ways in which economics can illuminate activities of every day life. His influence has been long lasting—his insights about work, childbearing, and schooling retain their power and salience to this day
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Leibowitz, A.A. (2006). Household Production and Children. In: Grossbard, S. (eds) Jacob Mincer A Pioneer of Modern Labor Economics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-29175-X_14
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