Labor Market Returns to Early Childhood Stimulation: A 20-Year Followup to an Experimental Intervention in Jamaica

Abstract

We find large effects on the earnings of participants from a randomized intervention that gave psychosocial stimulation to stunted Jamaican toddlers living in poverty. The intervention consisted of one-hour weekly visits from community Jamaican health workers over a 2-year period that taught parenting skills and encouraged mothers to interact and play with their children in ways that would develop their children's cognitive and personality skills. We reinterviewed the study participants 20 years after the intervention. Stimulation increased the average earnings of participants by 42 percent. Treatment group earnings caught up to the earnings of a matched non-stunted comparison group. These findings show that psychosocial stimulation early in childhood in disadvantaged settings can have substantial effects on labor market outcomes and reduce later life inequality.

Child health as human capital

“…In a developing country context, several authors have demonstrated the effects of reducing infectious disease (Baird, Hamory Hicks, Kremer, & Miguel, ; Beach, Ferrie, Saavedra, & Troesken, ; Bhalotra & Venkataramani, ) and improving nutrition (Adhvaryu, Bednar, Molina, Nguyen, & Nyshadham, ). In an important study, Gertler et al () examined the importance of attending to psychological needs by training mothers to provide psychosocial stimulation.…”

Fifty Years of Family Planning: New Evidence on the Long-Run Effects of Increasing Access to Contraception

“…Raj Chetty and others (2011) document that children randomly assigned to smaller classes from kindergarten to third grade and to higher-quality classrooms were more likely to attend college and had higher earnings at age 27. Finally, Paul Gertler and others (2013) show in a recent working paper that 1-hour weekly visits to parents of stunted toddlers over 2 years from community health workers in Jamaica raised the average earnings of participants’ children by over 40 percent. These earnings gains reflect a tremendous increase in educational attainment, as the treatment group was three times as likely to have some college education relative to the control group.…”

Estimating the production function for human capital: results from a randomized controlled trial in Colombia

“…It had two components: psychosocial stimulation and micronutrient supplementation. The stimulation curriculum was based on the Jamaican home visiting model, which obtained positive short-and long-term effects (Grantham-McGregor et al (1991), Walker et al (2006, 2011) and Gertler et al (2014). The protocols designed by Grantham-McGregor et al (1991) for Jamaica were adapted to be culturally appropriate for Colombia.…”

“…Examples include the Jamaica study (Grantham-McGregor et al (1991), Walker et al (2011) and Gertler et al (2014)), the Perry Preschool program and the Abecedarian experiment (Campbell and Ramey (1994), Campbell et al (2014)). In Attanasio et al (2014), we present the impacts of an 18-month long early childhood intervention in Colombia targeted at disadvantaged children aged 12-24 months old at baseline.…”

“…First, implementation of the curriculum has been shown to have long-run effects on cognition (Walker et al, 2005(Walker et al, , 2011 and labour market outcomes (Gertler et al, 2014). This in itself is evidence that it can induce deep changes in achievement rather than just teach children to remember a few activities and perform better on a test.…”