Michele Giannola
Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics and Statistics at the University of Naples Federico II. I study topics relating to the economics of education, household economics, and human capital formation.
I am also a Research Fellow at CSEF, and a Research Associate at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
I received my Ph.D. in Economics from University College London.
My CV is available here.
Email: michele.giannola@unina.it
Twitter: @GiannolaMichele
Research
Publications
Parental Investments and Intra-household Inequality in Child Human Capital: Evidence from a Survey Experiment, The Economic Journal, Volume 134, Issue 658, February 2024, Pages 671–727
Accepted Version, Online Appendix, IFS Working Paper W22/54, CSEF Working Paper, No. 650. This paper was awarded the Prize in memory of Maria Concetta Chiuri by the Italian Society of Public Economics for an outstanding paper written by an author under the age of forty.
Blog and Media Coverage: VoxDev
Abstract: Intra-household inequality explains 40% of child human capital variation in the developing world. I study how parents' investment contributes to this inequality. To mitigate the identification problem posed by observational data, I design a survey experiment with parents in India that allows me to identify beliefs about the human capital production function, preferences for inequality in outcomes, and the role of resources. I find that investments are driven by efficiency considerations: as parents perceive investment and ability as complements, they invest more in higher-achieving children and more so when constrained. Simulations indicate that interventions have intra-household distributional impacts through parental responses.
Helping Struggling Students and Benefiting All: Peer Effects in Primary Education, with Samuel Berlinski and Matias Busso, Journal of Public Economics 224 (2023): 104925
CSEF Working Paper, No. 634, IFS Working Paper W22/02, IDB Working Paper No. 1338
Blog and Media Coverage: Ideas Matter, El Pais (Uruguay)
Abstract: We exploit the randomized evaluation of a remedial education intervention that improved the reading skills of low-performing third grade students in Colombia, to study whether providing educational support to low-achieving students affects the academic performance of their higher-achieving classmates. We find that the test scores of non-treated children in treatment schools increased by 0.108 of a standard deviation compared to similar children in control schools. We interpret the reduced-form effect on higher-achieving students as a spillover effect within treated schools. We then estimate a linear-in-means model of peer effects, finding that a one-standard-deviation increase in peers’ contemporaneous achievement increases individual test scores by 0.679 of a standard deviation. Our findings show that policies aimed at improving the bottom of the achievement distribution have the potential to generate social-multiplier effects that benefit all.
Working Papers
The Effects of Center-Based Early Education on Disadvantaged Children's Developmental Trajectories: Experimental Evidence from Colombia, with Raquel Bernal and Milagos Nores New draft!
HCEO Working Paper 2022-027, SSRN, CSEF Working Paper No. 665. This paper was previously circulated as "The Effects of a Project and Play-based Early Education Program on Medium Term Developmental Trajectories of Young Children in a Low-income Setting"
Abstract: Early childhood development is a global priority, yet questions remain about how best to support disadvantaged children in low- and middle-income countries. We study the impacts of high-quality, center-based early childhood education on low-income children in Colombia through a randomized controlled trial, tracking participants longitudinally over five years. The program has sustained, positive effects on children’s health - including a 22% reduction in stunting - and positive effects on their cognitive development, partly driven by improvements in children’s health and nutrition. These effects operate through the educational and nutritional components of the program, rather than through parental behavioral responses to the intervention. The cognitive gains do not persist in the last year of the study, as children from the control group progress earlier to primary school and catch-up, highlighting the importance of considering counterfactual care alternatives to understand the effects of preschool programs in low- and middle-income settings.
Early Childhood Intervention for the Poor: Long-term Outcomes, with Alison Andrew, Orazio Attanasio, Britta Augsburg, Lina Cardona Sosa, Sally Grantham McGregor, Pamela Jervis, Costas Meghir and Marta Rubio Codina
NBER Working Paper No. 32165
Abstract: Early childhood interventions aim to promote skill acquisition and poverty reduction. While their short-term success is well established, research on longer-term effectiveness is scarce, particularly in LDCs. We present results of a randomized scalable intervention in India, that affected developmental outcomes in the short-term, including cognition (0.36 SD p=0.005), receptive language (0.26 SD p=0.03) and expressive language (0.21 SD p=0.03). After 4.5 years, when the children were on average 7.5 years old, IQ was no longer affected, but impacts persisted relative to the control group in numeracy (0.330 SD, p=0.007) and literacy (0.272 SD, p=0.064) driven by the most disadvantaged.
Parental Beliefs, Perceived Health Risks, and Time Investment in Children, with Gabriella Conti, and Alessandro Toppeta
IFS Working Paper W22/51, IZA Discussion Paper No. 15765, CSEF Working Paper No. 658, CEPR Discussion Paper DP17724, HCEO Working Paper 2022-045, SSRN
Abstract: When deciding how to allocate their time among different types of investment in their children, parents weigh up the perceived benefits and costs of different activities. During the COVID-19 outbreak parents had to consider a new cost dimension when making this decision: the perceived health risks associated with contracting the virus. What role did parental beliefs about risks and returns play for the allocation of time with children during the pandemic? We answer this question by collecting rich data on a sample of first-time parents in England during the first lockdown, including elicitation of perceived risks and returns to different activities via hypothetical scenarios. We find that parents perceive their own time investment to be (i) more productive and (ii) less risky than the time spent by their children in formal childcare or with peers. Using open-ended questions about their pandemic experience and detailed time use data on children’s daily activities, we then show that parental beliefs are predictive of actual investment choices, and are correlated with parental feelings derived from sentiment analysis. Lastly, we show that less educated parents perceive both lower returns and lower risks from investments, potentially causing a further widening of pre-existing inequalities in early years development, and suggesting the need for targeted informational interventions.
Child Development in the Early Years: Parental Investment and the Changing Dynamics of Different Dimensions, with Orazio Attanasio, Raquel Bernal and Milagros Nores
NBER Working Paper No. 27812 , CSEF Working Paper No. 626
Abstract: This paper uses the data on child development collected around the evaluation of a nursery program to estimate the details of the process of human development. We model development as made of three latent factors, reflecting health, cognitive and socio-emotional skills. We observe children from age 1 to age 7. We assume that, at each age, these factors interact among themselves and with a variety of other inputs to determine the level of development at following ages. Relative to other studies, the richness of the data we use allows us to: (i) let the dynamics be rich and flexible; (ii) let each factors play a role in the production of any other factor; (iii) estimate age-specific functional forms; (iv) treat parental investment as an endogenous input. We find that the dynamics of the process can be richer than usually assumed, which has important implications for the degree of persistence of different inputs in time. Persistence also changes with age. This has important implications for the targeting of investment and interventions, and the identification of windows of opportunities. The endogeneity of investment is also important.
Selected Work in Progress
The Joint Role of School and Home Inputs in Children’s Learning, with Pedro Carneiro, Anusha Guha and Sonya Krutikova
Abstract: In this project, we study the joint role that home and school inputs play in the learning process of primary school children in Vietnam. Vietnam is unique among Lower and Middle Income Countries (LMIC) in the exceptionally high learning levels which are achieved for its level of wealth. Our paper contributes to understanding how this is achieved and lessons that can be learned for improving poor learning outcomes that characterize many LMIC settings. The project aims to shed lights on the combined role of school and home investments, traditionally studied in parallel literatures, and on their interactions. Furthermore, our design and rich data-set allows us to study parental response to school inputs.
Effective Families or Effective Schools? Experimental Evidence on Fostering Children's Numeracy, with Samuel Berlinski and Alessandro Toppeta
The Impacts of Relaxing Credit and Information Constraints on Human Capital in the Early Years: Experimental Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa, with the Africa Gender Innovation Lab, Project in the field (endline data collection in preparation), AEA RCT Registry: AEARCTR-0003506
Policy Reports
Évaluation d’impact du projet Tekavoul en Mauritanie: Rapport de l'Enquête de Référence, World Bank, 2019, with Jean-Noël Batiobo, Ioana Botea and Julia Vaillant, In French.
Teaching
2024: Microeconomics (Undergraduate), Lecturer, University of Naples Federico II
2021 - present: Development Economics & Policy Evaluation (PhD), Lecturer, University of Naples Federico II
2017-2021: Microeconometrics (Undergraduate), Teaching Assistance, UCL
2017-2018: Game Theory (Undergraduate), Teaching Assistance, UCL
2015-2017: Microeconomics (Undergraduate), Teaching Assistance, UCL
I was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Economics Department at UCL in 2018 and in 2020.