Browsing by Autor "Orazio Attanasio"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Building Trust? Conditional Cash Transfer Programmes and Social Capital*
(Wiley, 2009) Orazio Attanasio; Luca Pellerano; Sandra Polanía-Reyes
Abstract In this paper, we propose a measure of social capital based on behaviour in a public goods game. We conducted a public goods game within 28 groups in two similar neighbourhoods in Cartagena, Colombia, one of which had been targeted for over two years by a conditional cash transfer programme that has an important social component. The level of cooperation we observe in the ‘treatment’ community is considerably higher than that in the ‘control’ community. The two neighbourhoods, however, although similar in many dimensions, turn out to be significantly different in other observable variables. The result we obtain in terms of cooperation, however, is robust to controls for these observable differences. We also compare our measure of social capital with other more traditional measures that have been used in the literature.
Child Development in the Early Years: Parental Investment and the Changing Dynamics of Different Dimensions
(2020) Orazio Attanasio; Raquel Bernal; Michele Giannola; Milagros Nores
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) treated 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.
Early Stimulation and Nutrition: The Impacts of a Scalable Intervention
(2018) Orazio Attanasio; Helen Baker‐Henningham; Raquel Bernal; Costas Meghir; Diana Pineda; Marta Rubio‐Codina
Early Childhood Development is becoming the focus of policy worldwide. However, the evidence on the effectiveness of scalable models is scant, particularly when it comes to infants in developing countries. In this paper we describe and evaluate with a cluster-RCT an intervention designed to improve the quality of child stimulation within the context of an existing parenting program in Colombia, known as FAMI. The intervention improved children's development by 0.16 of a standard deviation (SD) and children's nutritional status, as reflected in a reduction of 5.8 percentage points of children whose height-for-age is below -1 SD.
Preschool quality and child development
(2019) Marta Rubio Codina; Sonya Krutikova; Lina Cardona‐Sosa; Raquel Bernal; Orazio Attanasio; Alison Andrew
Global access to preschool has increased dramatically yet preschool quality is often poor. We use a randomized controlled trial to evaluate two approaches to improving the quality of Colombian preschools.
Preschool Quality and Child Development
(2019) Alison Andrew; Orazio Attanasio; Raquel Bernal; Lina Cardona‐Sosa; Sonya Krutikova; Marta Rubio‐Codina
Global access to preschool has increased dramatically, yet preschool quality is often poor and evidence on how to improve it is scarce.We worked with the government of Colombia to implement a largescale randomized controlled trial evaluating two interventions targeting the quality of public preschools in Colombia.The first, which was designed by the government and rolled out nationwide, provided preschools with significant extra funding, mainly earmarked for hiring teaching assistants (TAs).The second additionally offered professional development training for existing teachers, delivered using a novel low-cost video-conferencing approach.We find that, despite increasing per-child expenditure by around a third, the first intervention did not improve child development and led to a reduction in the time that teachers spent in the classroom, including on learning activities.In contrast, the second intervention led to significant improvements in children's cognitive development, especially those from more disadvantaged backgrounds, at little extra cost.The addition of the professional development training offset the adverse effects of TA provision on the time teachers spent on learning activities in the classroom and improved the quality of teaching.When we interpret our results through the lens of a model of teacher behavior, two insights arise.First, income effects and a perception that TA time was a good substitute for their own may have led teachers to endogenously scale back their efforts in the classroom in response to the provision of new resources.Second, the training prompted teachers to increase their perception of the usefulness of learning activities for child development and their perception that they had a comparative advantage in these learning activities relative to the TAs.