Working papers

Child Development, Parental Investments, and Community Social Support
Previously circulated as: “Child Development, Parental Investments, and Social Capital”

I examine how neighborhoods shape child development by studying the role of community social support: the collective capacity to nurture, supervise, and invest in children. Using novel neighborhood data, I measure and incorporate this community input, alongside parental investments, into a dynamic skill production function for children aged 6--15. Leveraging variation from Chicago’s public housing demolition, I find that community support significantly enhances both cognitive and socio-emotional skills, whereas parental investments primarily improve cognitive development. Counterfactual simulations indicate that raising community support in low-income neighborhoods to high-income levels reduces cognitive and socio-emotional skill gaps by 27 and 22 percent, respectively.

Middle Childhood Development: Parental Investments, School Quality, and Genetic Influences, with Sarah Cattan (A revised draft will be available soon)

In this paper, we examine how parental investments, school quality, and genetics influence child development. Specifically, we estimate skill production functions for both cognitive and socio-emotional skills at ages 7 and 11. We implement an instrumental variable approach and leverage information from school application portfolios to address the potential endogeneity of parental investments and school quality. Genetic propensities are measured using polygenic scores for educational attainment. Using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, we find distinct effects: parental investments improve skills at age 7 but have no impact by age 11, whereas school quality boosts both cognitive and socio-emotional skills at age 11. Genetic factors are positively associated with both skill types, contributing approximately one-third to one-fifth of the effect size of parental investments.

Selected Work in progress

Adapting to Climate Change with Migration: Tropical Cyclones and Human Capital Accumulation, with Siu Yuat Wong

The Philippines faces an annual average of ten tropical cyclones, five of which cause significant destruction. Climate change intensifies cyclones due to warmer waters. This paper identifies the impacts of tropical cyclones on children’s human capital accumulation and studies whether parental migration, acting as a form of insurance, can alleviate the negative impacts of cyclones in the Philippines. Using a panel dataset on migrant households, we estimate a dynamic model of parental migration and education investment, with an embedded education production function for children. We incorporate four mechanisms through which cyclones may impact a child’s educational outcomes into the model: income loss, changes in parents’ time inputs due to local employment loss or temporary out-migration, school disruptions, and health-related consequences. This approach allows us to disentangle and quantify the effects of each mechanism, as well as assess the potential of migration as a buffer. We aim to offer insights for policy recommendations to improve children's education outcomes amid cyclones.

Gene-environment Interaction Effects: Evidence from Early Childhood Programs, with Sarah Cattan