On all three main objectives listed above, the project achieved results that improved substantially the state of the art.
On measurement research we have:
- Developed new measures of child development in different dimensions (such as cognition, language, socioemotional skills), piloted in Tanzania, that could be deployed at scale.
- In Ghana, we used a short test often used (IDELA) and integrated it with a few items designed by Harvard psychologist Elizabeth Spelke. We are finishing the study using these data;
- extended the use of statistical techniques in Tanzania, Ghana, Colombia, and India to aggregate measures of child development and its determinants in coherent synthetic measures to study the process of child development;
- developed new measures to elicit parents’ subjective beliefs about the process of child development (in Colombia and India). The approach to elicit these beliefs, using questions about hypothetical scenarios, is original. In India, these data were collected longitudinally.
On the process of child development, we have:
- extended statistical techniques to estimate the process of child development flexibly, allowing the identification of its main determinants, i.e. the effect of initial conditions (in various dimensions – cognition, socioemotional skills, health), parental investment and other variables on subsequent development;
- studied how different dimensions of development interact dynamically and how the process changes over time; finding it becomes more persistent with age and that the impact of parental investment is larger at younger ages;
- used the estimated processes to interpret the short run impacts of a stimulation [6];
- used the estimated processes to identify windows of opportunities, i.e. ages where interventions are more useful to foster child development;
- In Colombia and Ghana, we looked at the impacts of child care centres improvements on child development. In Ghana (in a paper not complete yet) we found that cheap interventions can have sizeable impacts. In Colombia, we found mixed results ([2][16]); the message being that process rather than structure is more important for child development.
On parental investment we have:
- analysed in Colombia how parental investment is driven by different factors (such as local prices) that are unlikely to affect directly child development. This strategy allows us to identify the causal link between parental investment and child development [6]. Estimates taking into account parental investment endogeneity are larger than those that ignore it.
We have disseminated this research extensively, with publications, working papers and presentations at workshops. In Ghana and India, we presented the results we obtained to government and NGO. In Ghana this led to the scaling up of the intervention we studied. In India, the NGO we worked with is expanding the intervention to three states, funded by USAID.
