Child Development when Parents Enjoy Childcare

We develop a dynamic model of intrahousehold allocation to examine how parental time and resource investment trade-offs combine intertemporally to affect child human-capital development. The model allows parents' endogenous child investments, labor supply, and leisure choices to be determined simultaneously along an optimal time path. Joint production is incorporated, defined as the degree to which parental time devoted to childcare simultaneously serves as leisure. With improvements in assorted parameters describing household and neighborhood environments, child investments and development increase with the degree of jointness in parental time devoted to childcare.