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December 13, 3:30-5:00pm (POSTPONED - Check back soon for new date and time.)

The Intergenerational Elasticity of Earnings: Exploring the Mechanisms

Eric French, Cambridge University

Abstract: How do education, skills, investments of parental time and school quality, and family circumstances during childhood contribute to the persistence of earnings across generations? Building on a classic literature in sociology and a more recent literature in economics, our model allows each of the above variables to affect lifetime earnings directly, as well as through their contribution to human capital formation. The model allows us to decompose the intergenerational elasticity of earnings (IGE) into its drivers. Using data from a representative British cohort followed from birth to age 55, we show the above variables explain most of the IGE. A key driver is the increased levels of parental investments received by children of high income parents early in their lives, and the resulting cognitive development.

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December 12, 3:30-5:00pm

Families and Skills: Finding research opportunity in the 11,470 hours of the New Jersey Families Study

Joanne Golann, Vanderbilt University

Abstract: As video data on everyday interactions become easier to collect, they open up new possibilities for research. In this talk, we discuss our experiences with the New Jersey Families Study, a two-week, in-home video study of 21 families with a 2- to 4-year-old child. Given the vast amount of video data collected, we have so far centered our attention on food interactions as integral parts of families’ everyday routines and a strategic site to observe how families accomplish basic tasks. We find that families across social classes embrace a parenting approach characterized by flexibility, informality, and individuality, suggesting that middle-class parenting strategies have become more widespread in recent years. View Slides (Google Docs).

November 22

Middle Childhood Development: Parental Investments, School Quality, and Genetic Influences

Qianyao Ye, Xiamen University

Abstract: In this paper, we examine how parental investments, school quality, genetics, and their interactions influence child development. Specifically, we estimate the skill production functions for both cognitive and socio-emotional skills. We implement an instrumental variable approach and leverage information from school application portfolios to address the potential endogeneity of parental investments and school quality. We use polygenic scores to capture an individual’s genetic propensity for educational attainment. Using data from the Millennium Cohort Study in the UK, we find distinct patterns for cognitive skills and socio-emotional skills. Cognitive skills at age 7 are significantly influenced by parental investments, school quality, genetics, and lagged skills at age 5. Notably, school quality and polygenic scores are substitutes, indicating that better schools can mitigate skill disparities related to genetic predisposition for educational attainment. In contrast, socio-emotional skills at this stage are predominantly affected by previous skills and are less sensitive to investments.

November 1 2024

Life’s two lotteries: modelling the effects of genes and environments in human capital formation

Marina Aguiar Palma, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

September 06, 2024

Genetics and Lifetime Earnings: Understanding the Mechanisms

Weilong Zhang, University of Cambridge

Abstract: This paper examines the mechanisms linking genetic factors to lifetime earnings using data from a British cohort followed from birth to retirement. We develop and estimate a life-cycle model that integrates childhood skill formation with sequential schooling and occupational choices in adulthood. The model accounts for two types of genetic channels: mechanical (via skill formation and earnings equations) and behavioral (via parental investments, schooling, and occupational choices). We find both channels equally important: a one standard deviation increase in the polygenic score for educational attainment leads to a 15% increase in lifetime earnings, with 7% attributed to mechanical channels and 8% to behavioral channels. Our paper highlights the value of unifying early-life skill formation and sequential choices into a single framework for understanding genetic influences on lifetime earnings determination.

August 30, 2024

Subjective Gender-Based Patterns in ADHD Diagnosis

Anna Sanz-de-Galdeano, University of Alicante

Abstract: The increasing incidence of ADHD diagnosis and its uneven prevalence across demographic groups has sparked debates about misdiagnosis. We use data on individuals’ genetic predisposition to ADHD from the Add Health survey of U.S. schools to uncover relative standards in ADHD diagnosis. We estimate that students’ ordinal rank in the genetic predisposition to ADHD among their same-gender school peers has a positive, statistically significant, and substantial causal effect on ADHD diagnosis, holding students’ own genetic predisposition to ADHD constant. This effect is mainly driven by boys, contributing to explain the observed higher rate of diagnosis for boys relative to girls.

April 17, 2024

Parenting Home Visiting Program versus Cash Transfers for Preschool Children in Thailand

Tee Kilenthong, Research Institute for Policy Evaluation and Design, University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce

Abstract: This paper evaluates the impact of a weekly parenting home visiting program based on the Reach Up curriculum and a one-time cash transfer of 4,000 THB using a randomized controlled trial in Thailand. The targeted children were preschoolers with an average age of 38 months when the parenting program started. The intent-to-treat(ITT) effects of the 10-month parenting program and the cash transfer were significant, with effect sizes of about 0.142 and 0.123 SD, respectively. However, the effect of the parenting is more robust than the cash transfer. Treatment on the treated (TOT) effects revealed that each home visit improved child outcome by 0.005 SD. The parenting program benefited disadvantaged children more than the advantaged, while the cash transfer benefited younger children more than the older ones. Both parenting and cash transfer significantly raised time and material investment. The observed impact of the interventions seems to be driven primarily by material investment.

April 12, 2024

Intergenerational Altruism and Transfers of Time and Money: A Life Cycle Perspective

Eric French, University of Cambridge

Abstract: Parental investments significantly impact children’s outcomes. Exploiting panel data covering indi- viduals from birth to retirement, we estimate child skill production functions and embed them into an estimated dynastic model in which altruistic mothers and fathers make investments in their children. We find that time investments, educational investments, and assortative matching have a greater impact on generating inequality and intergenerational persistence than cash transfers. While education sub- sidies can reduce inequality, due to an estimated dynamic complementarity between time investments and education, it is crucial to announce them in advance to allow parents to adjust their investments when their children are young. Download the paper (.pdf).

April 5, 2024

Health Beliefs and the Long Run Effects of Medical Information

Jérome Adda, Bocconi University

Abstract: This paper studies the role of information on the evolution of beliefs and smoking in the United States in the 20th and early 21st centuries. We develop a dynamic and dynastic model of smoking, mortality and beliefs. The information about the harmfulness of smoking comes from three different sources: (i) medical information or public health messages, including obfuscation from the tobacco industry, (ii) learning from individual health shocks, and (iii) social learning, understood as the diffusion of information and beliefs within and across social groups over time. We estimate the model using data on smoking behavior, health information and data on beliefs on the effect of smoking on health that cover several decades and different social groups. The estimated model shows that each of these mechanisms played an important role in the formation of beliefs about the harmfulness of smoking and that social learning was particularly important for low-educated individuals.

March 01, 2024

Calling for Time: Examining Bias in Time Use Measurement using High-frequency Phone Surveys

Tamara McGavock, Grinnell College

Abstract: Tracking labor and productivity mostly depends on respondents’ recollections of events and perceptions of duration. While the frontier of neuroscience investigates the inter-dependence of memory and time perception to one’s activities or context, errors in labor and time use measurement are not well understood by economists. We provide novel experimental evidence on economically and statistically significant recall errors in time allocation to economic activities, household chores, and other activities in a sample of women in rural Ethiopia. Rel ative to traditional day reconstruction recall surveys (the control), high-frequency, randomly-timed phone surveys about activities at the time of the call (the treatment) identify short episodes of work that go unreported in recall surveys. However, the more economically active women are, the larger their errors are in over-estimating the duration of their work. As a result, women’s implied labor force participation and productivity are both under-estimated throughout their distributions.