| dc.description.abstract | As Becker indicated in “Human Capital”, schooling, training courses and even expenditures on medical care were the ways to invest in human capital. Parents have a large influence on their children’s lives, especially children’s human capital growth. Small families generally spend a lot on children’s education, including Japanese, Jews, and Cubans. Becker also mentioned that the number of children and spending per child tended to be negatively related. However, Taiwan is currently faced with a serious problem of the low birth rate, and it could initiate some negative effects on economic and social development.
In this paper, we examine how family and parental characteristics changed the spending of the education, social cultural and child care during the five periods of children’s lives by using data from 2012 to 2016, the Survey of Family Income and Expenditure. Considering there is a potential of sample selection, we control the self-selection bias via Heckman’s model. In conclusion, family income plays a vital role during every period of children’s lives; the higher of parental education level, the more money investing in children’s human capital; if the mother has a job, the spending on education and child care will increase noticeably; this paper also focuses on the issue that if the economies of scale exists in investment in children’s human capital. By estimating the predicted value, we found that expenditures of an additional child will be certainly lower than one child family. | en_US |