Human Capital Development and Parental Investment in India

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in 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

Essays on Culture and Early Childhood

“…We interpret this as evidence that parents compensate shocks to the children's skills. Our results are consistent across the literature on non-linear production functions of child abilities (95,98,97,108). In general, the share of parental investment is positive, significant and it increases after ChCC implementation.…”

“…This implies linear conditional means of children abilities given other latent traits, ruling out a non-linear production function. In order to add enough flexibility we assume latent factors are drawn from a mixture of two normal distributions, as done by Attanasio et al (98) 16 . We also assume that the errors of the equations above are normally distributed.…”

“…Our selection of measurements was guided by the literature on nonlinear production function of abilities (95,98,97,108) and the availabiltiy of measurement in our dataset. We have standard measurements of child's ability at birth, child's socio-emotional abilities and parental abilities.…”

Powerful t-Tests in the presence of nonclassical measurement error

“…In the literature on estimation of the skill production function (e.g. Cunha, Heckman, and Schennach (2010), Heckman, Pinto, and Savelyev (2013), Attanasio, Cattan, Fitzsimons, Meghir, and Rubio-Codina (2015), Attanasio, Meghir, and Nix (2017)), the measurements of skill production inputs are often elicited through the same data collection process so that different measurements of the same skill are likely to contain measurement errors that are correlated. More generally, any study that uses repeated measurements of a latent variable is likely to incur correlated measurement errors.…”

Essays on Human Capital Formation From Gestation to Adolescence

“…In fact, the preceding Pelotas 1982 Birth Cohort Study is the largest and longest running birth cohort study in a developing country (17). Further, previous studies on human capital formation in childhood and adolescence in developing countries have relied on subsets of populations, as (18), (19) and (20) which focuses on poorest families in Colombia, India and Peru and Ethiopia respectively. We have the entire population, not a subset, of all people born in Pelotas, Brazil in 1993.…”