Applied Micro Seminar : Every Tuesday
Time: 12:15 pm – 13:30 pm
Date: 27th of May
Room : 3001

Orazio ATTANASIO (Yale Department of Economics) – “Parental Beliefs and Learning : How Perceptions of the Process of Child Development Change”

Abstract : “We study the role of maternal subjective beliefs about the technology of skill formation in determining parental investments in child development. We start by discussing the construction of survey instruments we used to elicit maternal subjective beliefs about the process of child development. We then show how to use these data to construct estimates of maternal subjective belief and correlate them with maternal investments in child development. We apply our framework to a unique dataset collected as part of the evaluation of a parenting stimulation program in Colombia, whose target population was low-income households with children aged 12 to 24 months.
We find that maternal subjective beliefs predict parental investments. Furthermore, we show that most mothers’ beliefs can be well approximated by a Cobb-Douglas function of initial developmental level and parental investment. However, we find significant heterogeneity in the coefficients of this production function between mothers. In addition, on average, mothers seem to underestimate the returns on their investments.”

Co-authors : Flavio Cunha, Pamela Jervis,  Alessandro Toppeta

Organizers:
Benoît SCHMUTZ (Pôle économie du CREST)
Clément MALGOUYRES (Pôle économie du CREST)

Sponsors:
CREST