Social connections are fundamental to human wellbeing. This paper examines the social networks of young married women in rural Odisha, India. This is a group for whom highly-gendered norms around marriage, mobility and work are likely to shape opportunities to form and maintain meaningful ties...

The quality of the early environment children experience influences their human capital development. We investigate retention and compensation in the Early Care and Education workforce by merging datasets from three different government agencies in Texas. We employ non-structural methods to...

In this paper, we formulate a model of early childhood development in which mothers have subjective expectations about the technology of skill formation. The model is useful for understanding how maternal knowledge about child development affects the maternal choices of investments in the human...

We study how endowments, investments and fertility interact to produce human capital in childhood. We begin by providing empirical support for two key features of existing models of human capital: that investments and existing human capital are complements in the production of later human...

We study the importance of maternal subjective beliefs about the technology of skill formation in determining parental investments on child development. We describe our framework in three steps. First, we discuss the construction of the survey instrument we used to elicit maternal subjective...

This paper evaluates the Jumpstart Program (JSP), a parenting intervention implemented by a school district in the Houston area to enhance school readiness among economically disadvantaged three-year-old children. Unlike many early childhood programs typically tested in controlled research...

According to UNESCO, one-third of the world's youths are victims of bullying, which deteriorates academic performance and mental health, and increases suicide ideation and the risk of committing suicide. This paper analyzes a four-month parent-directed intervention designed to foster empathy in...

Research documents that parental beliefs influence early investments in children, which, in turn, determine early human capital and, eventually, other skills children acquire in later stages of the lifecycle, such as literacy. Our paper reports the results of an experimental evaluation of the...

Financial literacy and schooling attainment have been linked to household wealth accumulation. Yet prior findings may be biased due to noisy measures of financial literacy and schooling, as well as unobserved factors such as ability, intelligence, and motivation that could enhance financial...

In 1980, Chile dramatically reformed its retirement system, replacing what was an old insolvent PAYGO program with a new structure that relies heavily on funded defined contribution individual accounts. In addition, eligibility and benefit requirements were standardized, and a safety net for...