The Impact of Having A Young Child with Disabilities on Maternal Labor Supply by Race and Marital Status

Data from the National Maternal and Infant Health Survey (NMIHS) with the three-year follow-up survey data were used to assess the impact of having a young child with disabilities on maternal labor supply. The oversampling of low birth-weight and African-American births in NMIHS provides a larger proportion of disabled children and a bigger sample of black mothers than available in data used in prior studies. The empirical analyses examined the impact of child disability on maternal employment participation and conditional intensity by race and marital status using alternative measures of disability based on occurrence of specific health conditions as well as activity performance and general development. Exogeneity of activity-based disability measures was tested using health conditions as instruments and instrumental variable models were used to estimate their impacts on maternal labor supply. The results indicated that activity-based measures are endogenous for black single and white married mothers. Model results suggested large reductions in likelihood of employment participation of black single as well as white single and married mothers. Work intensity of employed black single mothers was also substantially reduced by child disability. Overall, no consistent effects of child disability were observed for black married mothers.