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This paper develops and estimates a dynamic model of student enrollment, school choice, academic achievement and grade progression to evaluate the impacts of Mexico���s conditional cash transfer program Prospera on educational outcomes over grades 4-9. Academic achievement is measured by nationwide standardized test scores in mathematics and Spanish. Enrollment decisions are the outcomes of sequential decisions at each age from individuals��� feasible choice sets, determined by the types of schools locally available and local-labor-market opportunities. The achievement production function has a value-added structure. Model parameters are estimated by maximum likelihood using nationwide administrative test-score data (the ENCEL data) combined with survey data from students and parents, census labor-market data, and geo-coded school-location data. The estimation approach controls for selective school enrollment in different types of schools, grade retention and unobserved heterogeneity. The results show that the Prospera program increases school enrollment and academic achievement for program beneficiaries in lower-secondary school grades (grades 7-9). The average test-score impacts are 0.09-0.13 standard deviations in mathematics and 0.03-0.05 standard deviations in Spanish. Students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds experience the largest impacts. The availability of telesecondary distance-learning schools is shown to be an important determinant of the Prospera program���s impacts on educational outcomes.

Son preference has been linked to excess female under-5 mortality in India, and considerable literature has explored whether parents invest more resources in sons relative to daughters—which we refer to as explicit discrimination—leading to girls’ poorer health status and, consequently, higher mortality. However, this literature has not adequately controlled for the implicit discrimination processes that sort girls into different types of families (e.g., larger) and at earlier parities. To better address the endogeneity associated with implicit discrimination processes, we explore the association between child sex and postneonatal under-5 mortality using a sample of mixed-sex twins from four waves of the Indian National Family Health Survey. Mixed-sex twins provide a natural experiment that exogenously assigns a boy and a girl to families at the same time, thus controlling for selectivity into having an unwanted female child. We document a sizable impact of explicit discrimination on girls’ excess mortality in India, particularly compared with a placebo analysis in sub-Saharan Africa, where girls have a survival advantage. We also show that explicit discrimination weakened for birth cohorts after the mid-1990s, especially in northern India, but further weakening has stalled since the mid-2000s, thus contributing to understandings of how the micro-processes underlying the female mortality disadvantage have changed over time.

Highlights • Birth weight, weight gain and height growth predict height and weight at 8 years. • Weight gain and height growth also predict educational outcomes at 8 years. • The predictive power of the unpredicted weight gain exceeds that of birth weight. • Height growth adds predictive power beyond that of birth weight and weight gain. • Height growth predicts receptive vocabulary, unlike birth weight and weight gain., We utilize longitudinal data on nearly 1800 children in Vietnam to study the predictive power of alternative measures of early childhood undernutrition for outcomes at age eight years: weight-for-age (WAZ8), height-for-age (HAZ8), and education (reading, math and receptive vocabulary). We apply two-stage procedures to derive unpredicted weight gain and height growth in the first year of life. Our estimates show that a standard deviation (SD) increase in birth weight is associated with an increase of 0.14 (standard error [SE]: 0.03) in WAZ8 and 0.12 (SE: 0.02) in HAZ8. These are significantly lower than the corresponding figures for a SD increase in unpredicted weight gain: 0.51 (SE: 0.02) and 0.33 (SE: 0.02). The heterogeneity of the predictive power of early childhood nutrition indicators for mid-childhood outcomes reflects both life-cycle considerations (prenatal versus postnatal) and the choice of anthropometric measure (height versus weight). Even though all the nutritional indicators that involve postnatal nutritional status are important predictors for all the mid-childhood outcomes, there are some important differences between the indicators on weight and height. The magnitude of associations with the outcomes is one aspect of the heterogeneity. More importantly there is a component of height-for-age z-score (at age 12 months) that adds predictive power for all the mid-childhood outcomes beyond that of birth weight and weight gain in the first year of life.

Background: Whether linear growth through age 12 y is associated with language and math achievement at age 12 remains unclear. Objective: Our objective was to investigate associations of linear growth through age 12 with reading skill, receptive vocabulary, and mathematics performance at age 12 y in four low- or middle-income countries (LMICs). Methods: We analyzed data from the Young Lives Younger Cohort study in Ethiopia (N=1275), India (N=1350), Peru (N=1402), and Vietnam (N=1594). Age 1, 5, 8, and 12 y height-for-age z-scores (HAZ) were calculated. Language and math achievement at age 12 y was assessed using country-specific adaptations of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, the Early Grades Reading Assessment, and a mathematics test; all test scores were standardized by age within country. We used path analysis to examine associations of HAZ with achievement scores. Twelve models were examined at each age (three tests across four countries). Results: Mean HAZ in each country was

Children from low socio-economic status (SES) households often demonstrate worse growth and developmental outcomes than wealthier children, in part because poor children face a broader range of risk factors. It is difficult to characterize the trajectories of SES disparities in low- and middle-income countries because longitudinal data are infrequently available. We analyze measures of children’s linear growth (height) at ages 1, 5, 8 and 12y and receptive language (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) at ages 5, 8 and 12y in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam in relation to household SES, measured by parental schooling or household assets. We calculate children’s percentile ranks within the distributions of height-for-age z-scores and of age- and language-standardized receptive vocabulary scores. We find that children in the top quartile of household SES are taller and have better language performance than children in the bottom quartile; differences in vocabulary scores between children with high and low SES are larger than differences in the height measure. For height, disparities in SES are present by age 1y and persist as children age. For vocabulary, SES disparities also emerge early in life, but patterns are not consistent across age; for example, SES disparities are constant over time in India, widen between 5 and 12y in Ethiopia, and narrow in this age range in Vietnam and Peru. Household characteristics (such as mother’s height, age, and ethnicity), and community fixed effects explain most of the disparities in height and around half of the disparities in vocabulary. We also find evidence that SES disparities in height and language development may not be fixed over time, suggesting opportunities for policy and programs to address these gaps early in life.

An estimated 220 million pre-school-age children in the developing world fail to reach their development potential because of four major factors: stunting, iron deficiency, iodine deficiency and lack of cognitive and social-emotional stimulation (Grantham-McGregor et al. 2007). This undoubtedly has a large human cost. But possibly, in addition, it has a large productivity cost, which is the focus of this chapter. The question is: what are the potential productivity gains from increased investments in early childhood development (ECD) in the developing world?

There is considerable emphasis in academic and policy literatures on intergenerational transmissions of poverty and inequality. The perception is that improving schooling attainment and income/consumption for parents in poor households will result in important reductions in poverty and inequality for the next generation of adults. However, the extents of these intergenerational effects on poverty and inequality are empirical questions that have not been examined much if at all, particularly for developing countries. We use data on children born in the 21st century in four developing countries to estimate critical relations with which to simulate how changes in parents’ schooling attainment and consumption would affect poverty headcounts and inequality in the children’s generation when the children become adults. We find that reductions in poverty headcounts and inequalities in the parents’ generation carry over to distributions of human capital and per capita adult consumption for the children’s generation, but the effects are not very large for the distribution of per capita consumption. Therefore, while reductions in poverty and inequality in the parents’ generation are likely to be desirable in themselves to improve welfare among current adults, they are not likely to have much impact on reducing per capita consumption poverty and inequality in the next generation of adults.

Metadata only record The impacts of social networks on changes in contraception in rural Kenya are investigated