Estimating the Production Function for Human Capital: Results from a Randomized Control Trial in Colombia

Attanasio, Orazio; Cattan, Sarah; Fitzsimons, Emla; Meghir, Costas; Rubio‐Codina, Marta

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3387126

Cited by 53 publications

(100 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…One is that, although additional time and money investments were made by mothers in the treated group, these changes induced by the intervention were not effective at promoting child development. For instance, time spent together may not have included sufficient stimulation (Attanasio et al, 2017), or monetary investments including learning materials may not have been age-appropriate. 17 A second explanation is the lack of statistical power.…”

Section: E Discussion: Exploring Results For Child Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that a low-cost, scalable, and oneoff CBT-based intervention offers significant protection against the chronicity of 17 Analysis of the Preschool Curriculum Evaluation Research Initiative Study (PCER, 2008) by Duncan et al (2017) shows that targeting skills is more effective for learning outcomes than the usual "whole child" approach. Attanasio et al (2017) find cognitive impacts of an intervention in Colombia that was designed to stimulate children and their estimates suggest that the parenting intervention was key.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Maternal Depression, Women’s Empowerment, and Parental Investment: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial

Baranov¹

2019

AEA Randomized Controlled Trials

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We evaluate the medium-term impacts of treating maternal depression on women's mental health, financial empowerment, and parenting decisions. We leverage variation induced by a clusterrandomized control trial that provided psychotherapy to 903 prenatally depressed mothers in rural Pakistan. It was one of the world's largest psychotherapy interventions, and it dramatically reduced postpartum depression. Seven years after psychotherapy concluded, we returned to the study site to find that impacts on women's mental health had persisted, with a 17% reduction in depression rates. The intervention also improved women's financial empowerment and increased both time-and money-intensive parental investments by between 0.2 and 0.3 standard deviations. JEL: I15, I30, O15

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Section: E Discussion: Exploring Results For Child Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Maternal Depression, Women’s Empowerment, and Parental Investment: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial

Baranov¹

2019

AEA Randomized Controlled Trials

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“…Attanasio et al (2014) also evaluate the effects of a weekly home visit program in Colombia that targeted children 12-24 months and lasted for 18 months. They find that enhancing mothers' engagement with their children positively affects their cognitive and socioemotional domains through an increase in parental investments and find no effects on mothers' depression (Attanasio et al 2014(Attanasio et al , 2015.…”

Section: Bakermentioning

confidence: 98%

“…Using a structural model, Attanasio et al (2015) provide evidence that directly links these parental investments in children to the children's improved cognitive outcomes.…”

Section: Mothers' Child Investmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Empowering Mothers and Enhancing Early Childhood Investment

2020

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Empowering women and enhancing children's early development are two important goals that are often pursued via independent policy initiatives in developing countries. In this paper we study a unique approach that pursues both goals at the same time: empowering mothers through tools that also advance their children's development. A program operated by AVSI, an Italian NGO, in a poor neighborhood of Quito, Ecuador, targets parents of children from birth to age 5. It provides family advisor-guided parent training sessions once every two weeks for groups of six to eight mothers and their children. We find that the program empowered women in various dimensions, including higher labor force participation and employment, higher likelihood of a full-time job in the formal-sector and higher wages. Treated mothers are also more likely to continue their education, make independent decisions regarding their own finances, have greater role in intra-household decisions, especially on issues involving children's education and discipline and increase parental inputs into their children's development. We find that treated children improve their cognitive and non-cognitive skills, for example, they are less likely to repeat a grade or temporarily drop-out from schooling, are less absent from and have improved behaviors in school, have better attitudes towards learning, and achieve higher scores on cognitive tests. Applying a recently suggested factor model of children's relative non-cognitive skills reaffirms our finding of significant gains in children non-cognitive skills. All results hold when we estimate aggregate treatment impacts, use summary indices instead of individual outcomes in order to account for multiple inference, when we use entropy balancing to adjust for differences in pre-treatment covariates, and when we use other robustness checks.

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“…27 But contrary to [Attanasio et al, 2015], I do not assume a dedicated measurement system, that is one in which each measure only proxies one factor prohibiting something children like, hitting with objects, keeping children looked up and ignoring them. As it can be seen, all of them point out towards a neglecting or physical way to discipline children.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Child discipline and social programs: evidence from Colombia

Lopez-Avila

2019

Journal of Development Effectiveness

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JEL Codes: D1, J13, J18, O15Abstract This paper examines how interventions during early childhood affect disciplining methods in Colombia, where poor households are eligible for a number of social programs targeted to young children, based on a proxy means index. These programs include child care options, nutritional programs and health checks. I analyze whether these programs affect parents' disciplining methods through two different identification strategies. I implement a regression discontinuity design exploiting the discontinuity on the probability of benefiting from these programs, as a function of the proxy means index used for targeting. I also implement a propensity score matching using differences in length of exposure to one of these programs, a subsidized child care program. Results from the first identification strategy show that fathers of children who benefit from these programs to a larger extent, use less physical ways to discipline their children. On the other hand, mothers of children who have been exposed longer to the subsidized child care option, appear to move to more pedagogic ways of discipline. These results hold in particular for households with working or more educated mothers.

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Estimating the Production Function for Human Capital: Results from a Randomized Control Trial in Colombia

Cited by 53 publications

References 53 publications

Maternal Depression, Women’s Empowerment, and Parental Investment: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial

Maternal Depression, Women’s Empowerment, and Parental Investment: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial

Empowering Mothers and Enhancing Early Childhood Investment

Child discipline and social programs: evidence from Colombia

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