for their useful comments and discussions; we are greatly indebted to Young Lives for generously sharing their data with us. Orazio Attanasio was partially financed by the ESRC Professorial Fellowship ES/K010700/1 and by the European Research Council Advanced Grants 249612. Costas Meghir thanks NIH for funding under grant R01 HD072120 as well as the Cowles foundation and the ISPS at Yale for financial assistance. Emily Nix obtained funding from an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. All mistakes are our own. Comments and suggestions are welcome. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
In this paper we use high quality data from two developing countries, Ethiopia and Peru, to estimate the production functions of human capital from age 1 to age 15. We characterize the nature of persistence and dynamic complementarities between two components of human capital: health and cognition. We also explore the implications of different functional form assumptions for the production functions. We find that more able and higher income parents invest more, particularly at younger ages when investments have the greatest impacts. These differences in investments by parental income lead to large gaps in inequality by age 8 that persist through age 15.
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AbstractIn this paper we estimate production functions for cognition and health throughout four stages of childhood from 5-15 years of age using two cohorts of children drawn from the Young Lives Survey for India. The inputs into the production function include parental background, prior child cognition and health and child investments. We allow investments to be endogenous and they depend on local prices and household income, as well as on the exogenous determinants of cognition and health. We find that investments are very important determinants of child cognition and of health at an earlier age. We also find that inputs are complementary and crucially that health is very important in determining cognition. Our paper contributes in understanding how early health outcomes are important in child development. * We thank Joe Altonji, James Heckman and Corina Mommaerts for their useful comments and discussions; we are greatly indebted to Young Lives for generously sharing their
A COVID-19 lockdown may impact household fuel use and food security for ~700 million sub-Saharan Africans who rely on polluting fuels (e.g. wood, kerosene) for household energy and typically work in the informal economy. In an informal settlement in Nairobi, surveys administered before (n=474) and after (n=194) a mandatory COVID-19-related community lockdown documented socioeconomic/household energy impacts. During lockdown, 95% of participants indicated income decline or cessation and 88% reported being food insecure. Three quarters of participants cooked less frequently and half altered their diet. One quarter (27%) of households primarily using liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) for cooking before lockdown switched to kerosene (14%) or wood (13%). These results indicate the livelihoods of urban Kenyan families were deleteriously affected by COVID-19 lockdown, with a likely rise in household air pollution from community-level increases in polluting fuel use. To safeguard public health, policies should prioritize enhancing clean fuel and food access among the urban poor.
This paper quantifies the extent to which individuals experience changes in reported racial identity in the historical U.S. context. Using the full population of historical Censuses for 1880-1940, we document that over 19% of black males "passed" for white at some point during their lifetime, around 10% of whom later "reverse-passed" to being black; passing was accompanied by geographic relocation to communities with a higher percentage of whites and occurred the most in Northern states. The evidence suggests that passing was positively associated with better political-economic and social opportunities for whites relative to blacks. As such, endogenous race is likely to be a quantitatively important phenomenon.
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AbstractIn this paper we estimate production functions for cognition and health throughout four stages of childhood from 5-15 years of age using two cohorts of children drawn from the Young Lives Survey for India. The inputs into the production function include parental background, prior child cognition and health and child investments. We allow investments to be endogenous and they depend on local prices and household income, as well as on the exogenous determinants of cognition and health. We find that investments are very important determinants of child cognition and of health at an earlier age. We also find that inputs are complementary and crucially that health is very important in determining cognition. Our paper contributes in understanding how early health outcomes are important in child development. * We thank Joe Altonji, James Heckman and Corina Mommaerts for their useful comments and discussions; we are greatly indebted to Young Lives for generously sharing their
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