Research

Publications

''Reinforcement or Compensation? Parental Responses to Children’s Revealed Human Capital Levels in Ethiopia'' with Catherine Porter. Journal of Population Economics, Volume 33, pages 233-270 (2020) (5-year IF 1.954 ABS 3);

also published as Young Lives Working Paper No. 183 (2018).

Abstract: A small but increasing body of literature finds that parents invest in their children unequally, but the evidence is contradictory, and providing convincing causal evidence of the effect of child ability on parental investment in a low-income context is challenging. This paper examines how parents respond to the differing abilities of primary school-age Ethiopian siblings, using rainfall shocks during the critical developmental period between pregnancy and the first three years of a child's life to isolate exogenous variation in child ability within the household, observed at a later stage than birth. The results show that on average parents attempt to compensate disadvantaged children through increased cognitive investment. The effect is significant, but small in magnitude: parents provide about 3.9% of a standard deviation more in educational fees to the lower-ability child in the observed pair. We provide suggestive evidence that families with educated mothers, smaller household size, and higher wealth compensate with greater cognitive resources for a lower-ability child.

It has also been featured in the Conversation.

Job Market Paper

• ''Maternal Autonomy as a Pathway to Child Nutritional Status: Evidence from Ethiopia 2005-2016''

Abstract: Several studies have found a correlation between women's empowerment and child nutritional status, but causal evidence to date has been limited, given the challenges to identification. We provide new causal evidence on the impact of maternal autonomy on child nutrition in Ethiopia, using three rounds of Demographic and Health Survey data from 2005 to 2016. We exploit a novel new method, the post-double-selection Lasso and combine with village-wave fixed effects to deal with omitted variables bias. This allows us to select high-dimensional raw regressors that have strong predictive power for maternal autonomy and child nutrition without concerns about having a sparse model. The findings indicate that one standard deviation increase in maternal autonomy can reduce the probability of a child being underweight by 2%. Moreover, this effect is most apparent in the older group of children aged 24-59 months who are likely to be weaned. This effect size is moderate yet significant. The study sheds light on the importance of improving maternal autonomy for children in the critical developmental period to prevent adverse outcomes of children, especially at a critical period just after weaning.

Working Papers

• ''Do Early Life Shocks Constrain Returns to Human Capital Investment? Evidence from a Large-scale Sanitation Programme in India.''

Abstract: This paper explores whether the productivity of investments in early childhood is constrained by in-utero adverse shocks, which could potentially decrease returns on subsequent investments in child development. To answer this question, we exploit two exogenous sources of variation conditional on variation in district and time - fetal nutrition input shocks proxied by local rainfall deviations and exposure to a sanitation campaign at birth - to investigate the interaction between endowments and investment. We use a difference-in-differences design to estimate impacts on a measure of cognitive skills of children aged 8-11 in rural India. We find that adverse rainfall in utero decreases test outcomes and further induces a zero return to India's Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), while the effects of the sanitation programmes mainly hold for high-endowed children who have been exposed to positive rainfall in utero.

Work in process

• ''What Works in Prenatal Home Visiting Programmes: Experimental Evidence from England and Germany'' with Gabriella Conti, Michael Robling, and Malte Sandner; funded by the Nuffield Foundation and the European Research Council (ERC).