Upcoming

April 17, 2024, 4:00-5:30pm, CEHD 180 (Register to attend via Zoom)

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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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