One out of every ten people in India experiences the death of a parent by the age of 18. This paper estimates the impact of parental death on educational choices in India and leverages the death shock to offer insights into the role of household resources and parental preferences in schooling decisions. Exploiting variation in the timing of parental loss among nearly 10,000 children, I find that both paternal and maternal death lead to a 7-percentage point decline in school enrollment. Time-use data sheds further light on this finding by showing that the death of either parent induces sons to enter the labor force and daughters to take on domestic responsibilities. Motivated by these facts, this paper examines three channels through which parental death might affect educational choices: household resources, parental inputs into education production, and parental preferences. To disentangle and quantify these mechanisms, I develop a structural model of household consumption and time allocation. Households in the model produce a domestic good and parents bargain over the intrahousehold allocation of resources in a collective framework. The model is estimated using shifts in time allocation and itemized expenditure in response to the death shock. The estimates show that compared to fathers, mothers have a stronger preference for schooling and a lower bargaining weight in intrahousehold decisions. Paternal death affects schooling by reducing household income, while maternal death affects schooling by changing household preferences and removing her contribution to home production. Counterfactual simulations show that the effectiveness of interventions to support orphans' education, such as pensions and conditional cash transfers, depends on the gender of the child and the deceased parent.

This paper studies the impact of parental migration on human capital investments of children left behind in the Northern Triangle of Central America (NTCA), comprising El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. The shared challenges in the NTCA—including corruption, violence, widespread poverty and economic instability—spur permanent migration of families. Permanent migration from the NTCA often follows two stages. Initially, one parent (often the father) migrates in search of work, commonly to the US. After the initial migrant is established, the family attempts to reunite in the destination country. The uncertainty surrounding family reunification may discourage or delay human capital investments back home, especially if returns to these investments vary between the home country and migration destination.

In collaboration with the Inter-American Development Bank, the Innovations for Poverty Action, and the Ministries of Education in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras we are currently collecting data on children of migrants and their households. The pilot survey is underway and the baseline household survey is scheduled for the first quarter of 2024. These primary data will be linked with administrative data on academic performance maintained by the respective Ministries of Education. We currently have access to digitized academic records for 1,077,646 students enrolled in pre-school through 9th grade in El Salvador.

Parents provide critical inputs in the child development process. Although previous research has established the adverse effects of parental loss on human capital accumulation, there is limited research on how the effects vary based on the child’s age at the time of the shock. This paper analyzes the role of timing in the effect of parental loss on school attendance, academic performance, and long-run outcomes. The study uses 20 years of longitudinal data from 200,000 orphans in Chile. These data come from matched administrative records of the Ministry of Education, the Pension System, the Ministry of Social Development, and the Civil Registry. We find that the loss of either parent decreases grade point average by 0.1 standard deviations in the year of the shock. This effect persists over time and so the cumulative impact of parental death is larger when it occurs early in the child’s life.

Using a newly constructed panel of state-level defense contracts, this paper studies the effect of defense spending on the U.S. macroeconomy. Summing observations across states, we estimate aggregate income and employment multipliers. Comparing these to local multipliers estimated with the panel provides evidence that local multiplier estimates may be reliable indicators of fiscal policy’s aggregate effects. Furthermore, evidence of small positive spillovers is found. Across several specifications, we estimate income and employment multipliers between zero and 0.5. This result is reconciled with the greater-than-one multipliers found in Nakamura and Steinsson (2014) by analyzing the Korean War years’ impact on the estimation. 

In this multi-project research agenda, my coauthors and I study the short-run and long-run consequences of parental migration for children’s development in the Northern Triangle of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador). In collaboration with the government of El Salvador, the Inter-American Development Bank, and Innovations for Poverty Action, we are conducting a nationwide census of children with migrant parents in El Salvador. In the following months, we will conduct similar censuses in Guatemala and Honduras. These data collection efforts will serve as the baseline for a longitudinal cross-country study of the long-run impacts of parental migration.

We will match the primary data collected with administrative records of children’s academic performance in school and in national standardized tests. Currently, we have access to digitized academic records for 1,077,646 students enrolled in pre-school through 9th grade in El Salvador for the years 2022 and 2023.

Location: Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador

Partners: Inter-American Development Bank, Innovations for Poverty Action, Ministry of Education of El Salvador

Funding: Inter-American Development Bank

Principal Investigators:

• Rodrigo Guerrero (Yale)

• Juan Hernández-Agramonte (IPA)

• Emma Näslund-Hadley (IDB)

• Siu Yuat Wong (Yale)