Papers
Papers (selected)
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Effects of Early Stimulation and Enhanced Preschool: Pathways to Effective Learning., joint with Attanasio, O., J.Behrman, M.Day, S.Grantham-McGregor, P.Gupta, P.Makkar, C.Meghir, R.Pal, A.Phimister, N.Vernekar. Submitted to Pedriatics, 2022.
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Impact of the Reach Up parenting program on child and parent: systematic review and meta-analysis, joint with Coore-Hall, J., Pitchik, H., Arnold, Ch., Fernald, L., Grantham-McGregor, S., Hamadani, J., Baker-Henningham, H., Rubio-Codina, M., Smith, J., Trias, J., Walker, S. Submitted to Pedriatics, 2022.
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Well-being of School Communities in the Context of COVID-19 Pandemic: A Qualitative Study in Chilean Low- SES Schools., joint with López, V., Ramírez, L., López-Concha, R., Ascorra, P., Alvarez, JP., Carrasco-Aguilar, C.,Squicciarini, AM., Simonsohn, A., Contreras, T., Opazo, H. accepted in Frontiers in Psychology, 2022. download here
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Does Maternal Mental Health and Maternal Stress Affect Preschoolers’ Behavioral Symptoms?., joint with Santelices, M. P., Irarrázaval, M., Brotfeld, C., Cisterna, C., Children, 8(9), 816, 2021. download here
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Enhancing the international study of positive youth development: Process, specificity, and the sample case of character virtues., joint with Lerner, R. M. and Bornstein, M. H. Journal of Youth Development, 16(2-3), 402-422, 2021. download here
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The Development of Positive Attributes of Character: On the Embodiment of Specificity, Holism, and Self-System Processes., joint with Lerner, R. M. and Bornstein, M. H. Human Development, 66:34–47, 2022. download here
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Validation of motor, cognitive, language, and socio-emotional subscales using the caregiver reported early development instruments: an application of multidimensional item factor analysis., joint with M. Waldman et. al., International Journal of Behavioral Development, 45(4), 368-377, 2021. download here
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Mothers’ Social Networks and Socioeconomic Gradients of Isolation., joint with Andrew, A., Attanasio, O., Augsburg, B., Behrman, J., Day, M., Jervis, P., Meghir, C., Phimister, A. NBER Working Paper No. 28049, 2020. download here
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Group Delivery or Home Visits of Early Childhood Stimulation: A Cluster Randomized Control Trial., joint with Attanasio, O., A. Akanksha, B.Augsburg, J.Behrman, B.Caeyers, M.Rubio-Codina, M.Day, S.Grantham-McGregor, R.Kochar, P.Makkar, C.Meghir, A.Phimister, K.Vats. Pedriatics, 146(6): 2020. download here
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Improving Access and Quality in Early Childhood Development Programs: Experimental Evidence from the Gambia., joint with P. Carneiro, M. Blimpo and T. Pugatch, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Volume 70, Number 4, 2022. download here
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Cluster randomized trial of the effects of timing and duration of early childhood interventions in Odisha-India: Study protocol., joint with Attanasio, O., Augsburg, B., Behrman, J., Grantham-McGregor, S., Meghir, C., Phimister, A., Rubio-Codina, M., Institute for Fiscal Studies Working Paper, WP19/06, 2019. download here
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Complementarities in the production of child health., joint with L.Abramovsky, B.Augsburg, B.Malde and A.Phimister. Institute for Fiscal Studies Working Paper, WP19/15, 2019. download here
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Subjective Parental Beliefs. Their Measurement and Role., joint with O. Attanasio and F. Cunha. NBER Working Paper No. 26516, 2019. download here
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Om foreldres investeringer i barns utvikling., joint with I. Almas, O. Attanasio, B. Caeyers, C. Ringdal, and V. Somville. Magma 6/2019.
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Measuring early childhood development at a global scale: Evidence from the Caregiver-Reported Early Development Instruments., joint with D. McCoy et. al., Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 45, 2018. download here
Work in Progress (selected)
A Dynamic Model of Early Parental Investments in Children's Human Capital - first draft 2017 - Job Market Paper - download here
Presented at: CPP Away Day, Institute of Fiscal Policies, UK, October 25, 2017, The early years: child well-being and the role of public policy, IDB Conference, The British Academy, UK, June 9-10, 2016 and Department of Economics, UCL, September 2016, UK
In this paper, I develop a dynamic structural model estimated with rich longitudinal data from Chile, in which I integrate a children's human capital model with multiple stages of childhood into a dynamic framework to explain parental investment decisions, modeling quality parental investment time and children's technology skill formation accounting for unobserved heterogeneity (income shocks). Parents maximise a constrained model, choosing consumption and quality time with their child and monetary investments in a sequential decision problem using a unitary model. This way, I explore potential mechanisms: First, the effect of parental preferences when they make decisions in each period of a child's life in terms of his/her developmental outcome measure as cognitive and non-cognitive skills; Second, I analyse the constraints parents face when they are taking their decisions in terms of monetary and quality time with their child; and third, the importance of addressing expectations driving investment choices. An important contribution to the literature of child development is a two-step procedure used to eliminate the presence of measurement error in the data for the inputs in the production function as well as integrating a life cycle model into the analysis and hence accounting for the endogeneity (correlation with the unobserved shocks) of investments. In the first stage, I estimate a measurement model based on a linear dynamic factor model and exploit cross-equation restrictions (covariance restrictions) proving that I can identify all of them. In the second step, I estimate together with the dynamic and stochastic structural model that incorporate parental choices based on the overall description of the mechanisms through which parental investment is modified and affects the human capital formation of their children, adding restrictions that involve weaker assumption than those derived from the literature, as well as allowing for simulations of the most effective targeting policies for Early Child Development compensating the most disadvantaged children.
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The myths behind the technology of skills in early childhood - first draft 2016 - Working Paper - download here
Presented at: EDePo Workshop, Institute of Fiscal Policies, March 2017
Genetics, environment and parental investment at different stages of early years of childhood affect the formation of human capital skills. Only when these channels are adequately incorporated in the study of the human capital formation will be possible to tackle early gaps in childhood and formulating efficient public policies. Despite these recent advances, there is still very little known about the return to cognitive and non-cognitive skills in developing countries. Recent studies have demonstrated how multiple factors relate in a complex way (Cuhna et. al. (2007, 2010)) through the use of technologies of skill formation. I follow the methodology proposed by Cuhna et al. (2010) to estimate a multistage technology of skill formation for capturing different development phases in the early years of a child and dealing at the same time the problem of endogeneity of inputs (correlation with the unobserved shock) and the multiplicity of inputs relative to measures. One contribution to the literature is that I include multiple parental investments not only regarding material resources (monetary investment) and quality time investment but also regarding cognitive stimulation and emotional support. This model provides two critical parameters, the self-productivity of skills (if the child learns how to count, then he can use it to learn other skills which means that skills are self-reinforcing and persist into future periods) and dynamic complementarity (synergy of investments at different t), hence, a second contribution is to analyse if complementarities change with age stages. This paper also contributes from previous research as include a rich Chilean data to apply the state-of-the-art methodology in the estimation of the production function. Exploiting the rich panel structure of the Encuesta Longitudinal de Primera Infancia (Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey (ELPI)) survey I find evidence about the importance of the stock of child's skills as well as early investment in childhood development. Comparing the formation of cognitive and non-cognitive skills in children dealing or not with endogeneity, there is substantial evidence of the effect of parental investment in early childhood development and support the fact that parental investment is endogenous. Based on the estimation of the same production function but for different age stages, the principal result is how parental investment foster cognitive skills between 24-47 months concerning early and older stages instead for future non-cognitive skills the parental investment have the same effect for all the age stages. There is evidence of cross-productivity for both skills which raises for older stages. Regarding the impact of separating the investment in material resources and quality time in child skills at age t the results show that material resources are essential for determining future child's cognitive skills and quality time for deciding future child's non-cognitive skills. Finally, splitting the investment in cognitive stimulation and emotional support in child skills at age t the results show that there is not much return regarding cognitive stimulation meanwhile the return of emotional support is higher on future child's non-cognitive skills.
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Scaling up Children's School Readiness in The Gambia: Lessons from an Experimental Study. With P. Carneiro, M. Blimpo and T. Pugatch - Working Paper - download here
Early childhood experiences lay the foundation for outcomes later in life. Large shares of children in Africa enter formal education without prior exposure to any structured pre-school program, including contact with, and practice of, the instructional language. Policymakers face a dual challenge of promoting access and quality in pre-school services, but evidence on how to manage this tradeoff is scarce. In early 2010’s, The Gambia government developed a comprehensive curriculum and decided to experimentally test it with two approaches to delivering pre-school services nationally. In the first experiment, new community-based centers were introduced to randomly chosen villages that had no pre-existing structured services. Another group of communities, which did not receive the program, served as a comparison group. In the second experiment, existing kindergartens tied to primary schools, known as Annexes, were randomly split in two groups. One group received the new curriculum along with a comprehensive training for an effective implementation, while the other group received the curriculum only and served as control group. We found evidence that both programs show significant heterogeneous impact, while not raising significantly the overall average levels of school readiness measured by a standardized assessment of language and fine motor skills. Children from more advantaged households improved less when exposed to community-based ECD centers, while more disadvantaged children benefitted from provider training in existing Annexes. Taking into account additional implementation-related considerations, we argue that on both the equity and efficiency grounds that the expansion of formal public kindergarten tied to primary schools would be more effective than the initiation of a community-based approach.
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Disentangling the Determinants of Early Childhood Development in Chile, MRes Economics UCL, 2010-2011 - Working Paper - download here
Presented at: EDePo Workshop, Institute of Fiscal Policies, September 2011 and Department of Economics, Universidad de Chile, December 2011
This paper presents a theoretical framework and empirical analysis to contribute to the debate about the determinants of early childhood development in a developing country from Latin America: Chile. The Ecological Environment theoretical model for childhood was proposed to define the determinants of early childhood. This paper aims to disentangle the determinants behind early childhood development based on multiple empirical strategies through the use of the first and second wave of a recent longitudinal survey, which was designed to characterise the child development. The data contains information about demographics, family's background, cognitive, socioemotional and physical measures for mothers and children under five years old and home assessment environment. The determinants of early childhood development, particularly, cognitive and non-cognitive skills, are studied through the estimation of contemporaneous and value-added cognitive and non-cognitive production functions, as well as the use of factor analysis such as item response theory for reducing the number of inputs. Three main results arise: (1) there are significant socioeconomic gradients in all cognitive tests between poorest and richest quintiles, which lead to a liability among disadvantaged children. Once controlling by observables, the gradient starts to decrease and in some cases to lose significance; (2) there is a significant effect of mother's characteristics and family background at later stage development (above 24/30 months old) measured principally by mother's education, age and cognitive skills, if the family is a two-parent family, the presence of younger/older children as well as home environment measures by parent-child activities, learning materials, parental involvement and verbal and emotional responsibility scores. The later stage development also adds a significant effect on attending a preschool. The previous determinants drive the fall in the socioeconomic gradient in both stages; and (3) regarding the non-cognitive skills, for both waves, the results are similar, there are socioeconomic gradients that are still significant after controlling for all the variables. If the child is male, have a negative and significant effect as well if they attend to preschool. Mother's education and age have positive and significant impact meanwhile having younger children in the household have an adverse and significant effect. Having both parents have a positive impact as well as child's weight at birth and the mother's cognition level. For the first time, all the sub scales of the mother's socioemotional test are (positively) correlated with the child's socioemotional skills. The home environment continues presenting positive and significant effect on child's development.
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Work in Progress
Eliciting Parental Beliefs. With O. Attanasio and F. Cunha - work in progress
The importance of what happens in the first years of life for human development has been extensively documented. When children grow up in poverty, both in developed or developing countries, children are exposed to a variety of risk factors that it is likely to contribute the accumulation of considerable lags in many dimensions, including cognitive and socio-emotional skills. These lags and delays have substantial long-term consequences for human development and well-being. One of the factors that seem to be extremely important in affecting children development is the level of parental investment, which can take the form of small amount of time parents spend in quality interactions with their children or low levels of didactic material investments. A potentially important question, therefore, is what drives parental investment. While financial and material resources are undoubtedly essential and a key determinant, they might not be the only or not even the most crucial factor that determines low levels of parental investment in low-income families. This consideration is particularly true if one thinks of the quality time parents spend with their children, where quality is defined regarding interactions and stimulating activities parents do with their children. The standard practice in economics to answer what drives parental investment is to estimate (dynamic) models where parents are assumed to “know” the production function of child development or human capital. One possibility to study parental behaviour without assuming that parents know the nature of the process of child development or the production function of human capital is to elicit directly parental beliefs about the process of child development and, in particular, about the usefulness of stimulation and investment and how these inputs interact with initial conditions. In this paper, we develop some of the ideas in Cunha et al. (2013) and elicit parental beliefs in a sample of poor mothers in Colombia and India. We show how to convert the answers to a specific set of questions into estimates of expected rates of returns on specific investment and then relate these estimates to actual parental investment behaviour.
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Who Benefits from Early Interventions? Evidence from Genetics. With O. Attanasio, G. Conti and C. Meghir - work in progress
Presented at: EDePo Research Meetings, IFS, 10 September 2015
This paper uses genome observational data to disentangle the heterogeneity in the impacts of an early childhood intervention as function of child and maternal genetic endowments, and how these affect human capital investments. We integrate genes into an economic model of child development to examine gene-by-environment interactions (GxE) where both G and E are randomized. We use detailed and unique data for the identification of the model from an early childhood intervention ran in Colombia, in which, home visitors paid weekly visits to randomly chosen households with the aim of promoting child cognitive and non-cognitive development and improving mother-child interactions. The intervention targeted poor households with children aged 12 to 24 months at baseline and lasted 18 months. During the second follow-up DNA was extracted from mother-children pairs which is the first and only case to date for a less developed country. We examine if the treatment effects are greater for children (and mothers) with more plastic allele, if the mechanisms driving this heterogeneity occur because the mothers with the plastic allele have greater changes in investment and if there is evidence that functionality of genotypes (in addition to frequency) differs across ethnicities. We also study, testing balancing by allele frequency, genotype frequencies, and perform Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium (HWE) tests, if the characteristics of those who gave consent different from those who did not and if this differ between treatment and control groups independent of genotype but also in terms of genotype to reveal if more mothers with the sensitive genotype are the ones that give their consent.
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Intergenerational Transmission on human capital accumulation. With O. Bandeira, I. Rasul and A. Andrew - work in progress
We evaluate long run effects of an anti-poverty transfer programme on human capital accumulation on those who were exposed to the programme in early childhood. To do this we assessed several domains of human capital found to be particularly salient in intergenerational transmission of poverty to a planned follow-up survey of long-run impacts of an asset transfers programme implemented in Bangladesh in 2007. We focus specifically on the long-run effects of the programme on human capital accumulation among those who were age 0-5 at the time of programme implementation and are age 10-15 at the time of the planned follow-up round. In addition to assessing the impacts of the asset transfer programme, this feature allows us to (a) assess impacts of exposure to the programme at different stages of early childhood; and (b) rigorously assess impacts of a selection key environmental factors captured in the previous rounds of data on child development. This paper contributes substantively to the literature on the impact of anti-poverty programmes by examining long-run impacts on human capital accumulation.
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Incentives for public sector workers in real-world conditions: an experimental evaluation of midwives’ retention incen-tives in Nigeria., joint with M. Holmlund, P. Rosa Dias and M. Vera-Hernández - work in progress
There is limited field evidence on why extrinsic incentives help, or fail to help, to incentivize a prosocial activity. Combining lab-in-the-field behavioural games with a large scale experiment in Nigeria that provided midwives with retention incentives (monetary, non-monetary, or their combination), we test two of the leading hypotheses of why incentives work or backfire: change in social norms and crowding out of image motivation. We find that monetary incentives improved midwife retention, and they made it less socially acceptable to leave their job early. On the contrary, non-monetary incentives did not improve midwife retention and we find evidence that they crowded out image motivation. Our results contrast with previous literature that find that monetary incentives have detrimental effects on prosocial activities. We argue that a crucial difference is that our prosocial activity is a pre-existing paid job and hence monetary aspects are already salient even in the absence of the incentives that we introduce.
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Intra-household resource allocation: Do mothers and couples have different preferences?, joint with I. Almas, O. Attanasio, and C. Ringdal - work in progress
This study analyzes, with a novel experiment, the allocation preferences within households, both in terms of allocation to spending of different goods, and allocations to different household members. Preferences are elicited using a hypothetical allocation decision: the participants allocate between six consumption categories, and to different household members within each category: the mother, the father, and a child. A total of 287 households with a child between 0 and 3 years from Northern Tanzania participated in the study. It was randomized whether the allocation decision was made by the mother alone or the couple jointly. The results show that mothers allocate more to children than couples do. This finding is driven by mothers allocating more to children’s food and clothing consumption. We also find that our elicited preferences predict actual parental practices.
Previous Research
The Inflationary Compensation and its components in Chile. Revista Economía Chilena, Vol. 10(2), August 2007 - download here
This paper studies the determinants of the components of the inflation compensation defined as the difference that exists among the nominal interest rates and index-linked. The previous thing permits to evaluate how much they impact these in the elections of briefcase of the economic agents and, therefore, in the interest rates that are observed in the market. For this they break down the determinants, building series of time until today nonexistent. Subsequently models of behavior for the expectations of inflation they are estimate, the premium by risk inflation, risk indexing and risk liquidity, for instruments of different time limit and in two dimensions. The empirical results confirm the hypothesis presented on the importance to incorporate not only the expectations of inflation to explain the inflation compensation in the Chilean economy but also the existing risks in the market deriving finally to a relation of Fisher more extensive than their beginnings.
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On Shore Rate in Chile. With D. Calvo and F. Alarcón. Revista Economía Chilena, Vol. 11, N2, August 2008 - download here
Parte integral del mercado de cobertura cambiaria corresponde a la tasa de interés en dólares local (on-shore) implícita en los precios forward de las operaciones de cobertura cambiaria habituales en el mercado interno y en el mercado externo. Nuestra contribución en este trabajo es analizar una serie temporal de esta tasa que ha experimentado fluctuaciones significativas que la han elevado por sobre su valor referente natural correspondiente a la libor. Asimismo, examinamos los factores que determinan la diferencia (spread) entre esta tasa y la libor. Así, entonces, en este artículo contribuimos a mejorar la comprensión del funcionamiento del mercado de cobertura cambiaria chileno. Trabajos previos han analizado y descrito el funcionamiento del mercado de cobertura chileno. En efecto, Alarcón, Selaive y Villena (2004) realizan una descripción y comparación internacional de este mercado, mientras Ahumada y Selaive (2007) estiman el grado de desarrollo del mercado de cobertura y el rol que han jugado sus fundamentos en su significativo crecimiento. Finalmente, Jadresic y Selaive (2005) analizan la e ciencia de este mercado y el rol que la actividad cambiaria podría haber tenido sobre la volatilidad del tipo de cambio contado (spot). La siguiente sección introduce la paridad cubierta de tasas. La tercera sección analiza la evolución de la tasa de interés on-shore. La última sección concluye.
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