Helping Children Catch Up: Early Life Shocks and the PROGRESA Experiment / Achyuta Adhvaryu, Anant Nyshadham, Teresa Molina, Jorge Tamayo.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Adhvaryu, Achyuta.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Nyshadham, Anant.

Molina, Teresa.

Tamayo, Jorge.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w24848.

NBER working paper series no. w24848

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Helping Children Catch Up

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2018.

Summary:

Can investing in children who faced adverse events in early childhood help them catch up? We answer this question using two orthogonal sources of variation - resource availability at birth (local rainfall) and cash incentives for school enrollment - to identify the interaction between early endowments and investments in children. We find that adverse rainfall in the year of birth decreases grade attainment, post-secondary enrollment, and employment outcomes. But children whose families were randomized to receive conditional cash transfers experienced a much smaller decline: each additional year of program exposure during childhood mitigated more than 20 percent of early disadvantage.

Notes:

Print version record

July 2018.