Parental beliefs, perceived health risks, and time investment in children

First, consistent with the wide heterogeneity in the answers to the subjective probability ques- tions, there is a substantial degree of heterogeneity in the beliefs about the returns and risks of different types of investment in our sample, with a minority of parents also perceiving negative returns: for ex- ample, the expected return from childcare attendance is 7.5 at the 25th percentile and 28. [...] We first add race and gender of the respondent, sex and age of the child, and quality of the early years settings available to the respondents at the Local Authority level, as measured by the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED).20 We show that the results are qualitatively the 20The Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) typically inspects the quality of early years settings every year. [...] Using data from the Office for National Statistics, we further examine whether perceived returns and risks are associated with the number of COVID-19 cases (measured in the two weeks before the survey) in the Local Authority where the respondent resided: we find that this is generally not the case (Appendix Table B7).21 We also find that the relationship between the number of COVID-19 deaths (meas. [...] The ratings are at the provider level; for the analysis, we aggregate them and use the average rating in the Local Authority where the respondent resided, since we did not ask the name of the early years setting attended. [...] Interestingly, the results in Table 6 also show that the gradients in the time the mother and the father spend in active play with the child go in opposite directions: respondents with higher levels of education report that in their household the mother spends less time actively playing with the child (column 3), while the father spends more time in this activity (column 4), as compared to those w.