We are grateful to many colleagues for a number of conversations. In particular, we would like to thank Sarah Cattan, Costas Meghir and Emily Nix for useful discussions on measuring child development at different ages. We would also like to thank AEIOTU's staff for the support. Attanasio's research was partially funded by ERC Advanced Grant AdG-695300. Bernal and Nores are also grateful to the Jacobs Foundation, Grant No. 209-805-1, and the UBS Optimus Foundation for their financial support to the aeioTu Longitudinal Trial. Bernal acknowledges financial support from "Convocatoria Facultad de Economía-Vicerrectoría de Investigaciones 2017" Universidad de los Andes. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research At least one co-author has disclosed a financial relationship of potential relevance for this research. Further information is available online at http://www.nber.org/papers/w27812.ack 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 They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
Intra-household inequality explains up to 50 percent of the cross-sectional variation in child human capital in the developing world. I study the role played by parents' educational investment to explain this inequality and its determinants. To mitigate the identification problem posed by observational data, I design a lab-in-the-field experiment with poor parents in India. I develop new theory-driven survey measures based on hypothetical scenarios that allow me to separately identify parental beliefs about the human capital production function and their preferences for inequality in children's outcomes, as well as study the role of household resources. I find that parents are driven by efficiency considerations rather than inequality concerns over children's final outcomes. Because they perceive investments and baseline ability to be complements in the production function, they invest more in higher-achieving children. Resources are important, as constrained parents select more unequal allocations. I then show that primitive parameters identified in the experiment are predictive of actual investment behaviour. The results indicate that families act as a reinforcing agent, magnifying ability-based educational inequalities between children.
When deciding how to allocate their time among different types of investment in their children, parents weigh up the perceived benefits and costs of different activities. During the COVID-19 outbreak parents had to consider a new cost dimension when making this decision: the perceived health risks associated with contracting the virus. What role did parental beliefs about risks and returns play for the allocation of time with children during the pandemic? We answer this question by collecting rich data on a sample of first-time parents in England during the first lockdown, including elicitation of perceived risks and returns to different activities via hypothetical scenarios. We find that parents perceive their own time investment to be (i) more productive and (ii) less risky than the time spent by their children in formal childcare or with peers. Using open-ended questions about their pandemic experience and detailed time use data on children's daily activities, we then show that parental beliefs are predictive of actual investment choices, and are correlated with parental feelings derived from sentiment analysis. Lastly, we show that less educated parents perceive both lower returns and lower risks from investments, potentially causing a further widening of pre-existing inequalities in early years development, and suggesting the need for targeted informational interventions.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.