Balancing Work and Child: The Impact of Parental Work Hours on Children’s Education Attainment

• In Event: When Work and Care Collide: Labor, Policy, and Equity in Early Childhood

Abstract

Parental investments—both in time and money—are critical in shaping children’s developmental outcomes. Drawing from Heckman’s human capital formation framework (Cunha & Heckman, 2007; Heckman, 2007), which emphasizes the cumulative nature of skill acquisition across life stages, this study investigates how changes in parental work hours during children’s formative years affect their mid-term human capital outcomes, particularly educational attainment. While prior research has extensively examined the effects of work hours on individual-level outcomes such as employment, earnings, health, and productivity, little is known about the intergenerational consequences—namely, how parental labor activities shape children’s trajectories. Existing studies primarily focus on the extensive margin of labor supply, such as parental leave or employment status. This study shifts the lens to the intensive margin by assessing the causal effects of marginal changes in work hours on children’s education.

Exploiting a work hour reform in South Korea implemented between 2004 and 2011, this paper provides new evidence on the causal relationship between parental work hours and children’s education attainment. The 2003 legislation gradually regulated the statutory and maximum weekly work hours across industries and firm sizes, creating a quasi-experimental setting. The staggered rollout of the reform enables the use of an event study design and staggered difference-in-differences approach, leveraging exogenous variation in policy timing across groups.

Using data from the Korean Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS), the study first estimates the direct impact of the reform on work hours by gender. Results from the event study framework show that male employees, who were more likely to exceed statutory work hours prior to the reform, experienced a significant reduction of approximately five hours per week post-reform. In contrast, the effect for female workers was minimal, likely due to their lower baseline hours, which were already near or below the statutory threshold for a large portion of the female labor force. These gendered responses reflect the reform's asymmetric binding nature and inform subsequent heterogeneity analysis.

Next, the study examines how these reductions in work hours influenced parental engagement and children's educational outcomes. Previous evidence suggests that fathers’ reduced work hours led to greater involvement in informal childcare, potentially substituting for (or complementing) formal care services. This increased time investment by fathers is associated with meaningful improvements in children’s educational attainment, including extended years of education. Quantitatively, a one-hour reduction in a parent’s workweek is associated with a 0.1-year increase in a child’s educational attainment.

This study contributes to the literature on family, labor market reform, and intergenerational mobility by highlighting the long-term benefits of reducing excessive parental work hours. It underscores how labor regulations, beyond their direct effects on workers, can ripple into the next generation through shifts in parental time allocation. The findings also inform policy debates on work-life balance and family well-being, emphasizing that even marginal changes in working hours can have significant educational consequences for children—particularly when those changes allow parents, especially fathers, to be more actively involved in their children’s lives.

Author

• Taehyun Ethan Kim, The Ohio State University
  Presenting Author