Parental Time and Material Investments in Rural Thailand

This paper studies the roles of family structure, wage and child's gender on parental time and material investments in rural Thailand. Our findings consistently show that female children received more time, but less material investments. The material investment was significantly lower for children in households with no parents, while the difference in time investment was not significant. Based on an economic model of parental investment, these results suggest the factor share of time relative to material input is larger for girls and households with no parents. We also identified the elasticity of substitution between time and material investments, which suggests that both of the inputs are surprisingly complementary. We cannot reject that the skill formation is a Cobb-Douglas production function.