Early childhood development is becoming the focus of policy worldwide. However, the evidence on the effectiveness of scalable models is scant, particularly when it comes to infants in developing countries. In this paper, we describe and evaluate with a cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial an intervention designed to improve the quality of child stimulation within the context of an existing parenting program in Colombia, known as FAMI. The intervention improved children’s development by 0.16 of a standard deviation (SD) and children’s nutritional status, as reflected in a reduction of 5.8 percentage points of children whose height-for-age is below -1 SD.
This article examines the role that implementation science can play in evidence-based parenting programs. Although parenting programs can support parents in their caregiving roles, adapting and taking an evidence-based approach from one place to another without attending to implementation factors may contribute to poor impact in a new setting. Implementation science enables researchers to move beyond monitoring and evaluation of outcomes of a parenting program to understanding the process of putting the program into practice. Factors such as whether the program meets the needs of families and communities, how to secure buy-in from key stakeholders, what training and supervision are needed for the workforce, and ways that parenting programs can be integrated in existing infrastructure are all critical to successful implementation. Quality improvement can be built into the implementation process through feedback loops that inform rapid changes and testing cycles over time as a program is implemented. If researchers lead initial implementation of parenting programs, they must determine how the program can continue to work when using community workers and local systems rather than researchers. Open access components are especially important for the implementation of parenting programs in low- and middle-income countries to avoid prohibitive costs of proprietary programs and to benefit from flexibility in adapting components to meet the needs of particular local populations. Parenting programs benefit when policy makers, program leaders, and researchers attend not only to the what but also to the how of implementation.
A key challenge in developing countries interested in providing early childhood development (ECD) programmes at scale is whether these programmes can be effectively delivered through existing public service infrastructures. We present the results of a randomised experiment evaluating the effects of a home-based parenting programme delivered by cadres in China’s Family Planning Commission (FPC)—the former enforcers of the one-child policy. We find that the programme significantly increased infant skill development after six months and that increased investments by caregivers alongside improvements in parenting skills were a major mechanism through which this occurred. Children who lagged behind in their cognitive development and received little parental investment at the onset of the intervention benefited most from the programme. Household participation in the programme was associated with the degree to which participants had a favourable view of the FPC, which also increased due to the programme.
Poor early childhood development in low- and middle-income countries is a major public health problem. Efficacy trials have shown the potential of early childhood development interventions but scaling up is costly and challenging. Guidance on effective interventions’ delivery is needed. In an open-label cluster-randomized control trial, we compared the effectiveness of weekly home visits and weekly mother-child group sessions. Both included nutritional education, whose effectiveness was tested separately.
We estimate production functions for cognition and health for children aged 1–12 in India, based on the Young Lives Survey. India has over 70 million children aged 0–5 who are at risk of developmental deficits. The inputs into the production functions include parental background, prior child cognition and health, and child investments, which are taken as endogenous. Estimation is based on a nonlinear factor model, based on multiple measurements for both inputs and child outcomes. Our results show an important effect of early health on child cognitive development, which then becomes persistent. Parental investments affect cognitive development at all ages, but more so for younger children. Investments also have an impact on health at early ages only.
We examine changes in inequality in socio-emotional skills very early in life in two British cohorts born 30 years apart. We construct comparable scales using two validated instruments for the measurement of child behaviour and identify two dimensions of socio-emotional skills: ‘internalising’ and ‘externalising’. Using recent methodological advances in factor analysis, we establish comparability in the inequality of these early skills across cohorts, but not in their average level. We document for the first time that inequality in socio-emotional skills has increased across cohorts, especially for boys and at the bottom of the distribution. We also formally decompose the sources of the increase in inequality and find that compositional changes explain half of the rise in inequality in externalising skills. On the other hand, the increase in inequality in internalising skills seems entirely driven by changes in returns to background characteristics. Lastly, we document that socio-emotional skills measured at an earlier age than in most of the existing literature are significant predictors of health and health behaviours. Our results show the importance of formally testing comparability of measurements to study skills differences across groups, and in general point to the role of inequalities in the early years for the accumulation of health and human capital across the life course.
This article studies the differential effect of targeting cash transfers to men or women on household expenditure on non-durables. We study a policy intervention in the Republic of North Macedonia that offers cash transfers to poor households, conditional on having their children attending secondary school. The recipient is randomised across municipalities, with payments targeted to either the mother or the father of the child. Targeting transfers to women increases the expenditure share on food by 4 to 5 percentage points. At low levels of food expenditure, there is a shift towards a more nutritious diet.
This paper uses a dataset from Tanzania with information on consumption, income, and income shocks within and across family networks. Crucially and uniquely, it also contains data on the degree of information existing between each pair of households within family networks. We use these data to construct a novel measure of the quality of information both at the level of household pairs and at the level of the network. We also note that the individual level measures can be interpreted as measures of network centrality. We study risk sharing within these networks and explore whether the rejection of perfect risk sharing that we observe can be related to our measures of information quality. We show that households within family networks with better information are less vulnerable to idiosyncratic shocks. Furthermore, we show that more central households within networks are less vulnerable to idiosyncratic shocks. These results have important implications for the characterisation of the empirical failure of the perfect risk-sharing hypothesis and point to the importance of information frictions.
This paper examines the prices of basic staples in rural Mexico. We document that nonlinear pricing in the form of quantity discounts is common, that quantity discounts are sizable for basic staples, and that the well-known conditional cash transfer program Progresa has significantly increased quantity discounts, although the program, as documented in previous studies, has not affected unit prices on average. To account for these patterns, we propose a model of price discrimination that nests those of Maskin and Riley (1984) and Jullien (2000), in which consumers differ in their tastes and, because of subsistence constraints, in their ability to pay for a good. We show that under mild conditions, a model in which consumers face heterogeneous subsistence or budget constraints is equivalent to one in which consumers have access to heterogeneous outside options. We rely on known results to characterize the equilibrium price schedule, which is nonlinear in quantity.
We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to significant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children aged 12 to 24 months at baseline. We estimate the determinants of parents' material and time investments in these children and evaluate the impact of the treatment on such investments. We then estimate the production functions for cognitive and socio-emotional skills. The effects of the program can be explained by increases in parental investments, emphasizing the importance of parenting interventions at an early age.
We study theoretically and empirically the demand for microcredit under different liability arrangements and risk environments. A theoretical model shows that the demand for joint-liability loans can exceed that for individual-liability loans when risk-averse borrowers value their long-term relationship with the lender. Joint liability then offers a way to diversify risk and reduce the chance of losing access to future loans. We also show that the demand for loans depends negatively on the riskiness of projects. Using data from a randomised controlled trial in Mongolia we find that these model predictions hold true empirically. In particular, we use innovative data on subjective risk perceptions to show that expected project risk negatively affects the demand for loans. In line with an insurance role of joint-liability contracts, this effect is muted in villages where joint-liability loans are available.
In this paper, we make three substantive contributions. First, we use elicited subjective income expectations to identify the levels of permanent and transitory income shocks in a lifecycle framework. Second, we use these shocks to assess whether households’ consumption is insulated from them. Third, we use the shock data to estimate an Euler equation for consumption. We find that households are able to smooth transitory shocks, but adjust their consumption in response to permanent shocks, albeit not fully. The estimates of the Euler equation parameters with and without expectational errors are similar, which is consistent with rational expectations. We break new ground by combining data on subjective expectations about future income from the Michigan Survey with microdata on actual income from the Consumer Expenditure Survey.
Colombia’s national early childhood strategy launched in 2011 aimed at improving the quality of childcare services offered to socio-economically vulnerable children, and included the possibility that children and their childcare providers could transfer from non-parental family daycare units to large childcare centers in urban areas. This study seeks to understand whether the offer to transfer and the actual transfer from one program to the other had an impact on child cognitive and socioemotional development, and nutrition, using a cluster-randomized control trial with a sample of 2767 children between the ages of 6 and 60 months located in 14 cities in Colombia. The results indicate a negative effect of this initiative on cognitive development, a positive effect on nutrition, and no statistically significant effect of the intervention on socioemotional development. We also explored the extent to which these impacts might be explained by differences in the quality of both services during the transition, and report that quality indicators are low in both programs but are significantly worse in centers compared to community nurseries.