Browsing by Autor "Raquel Bernal"

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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.
Economic Development: Challenges and Policies (Desarrollo Económico: Retos y Políticas Públicas ) (Spanish)
(2009) Raquel Bernal; Adriana Camacho; Carmen Elisa Flórez Nieto; Christian Jaramillo; Oskar Nupia; Ximena Peña; Catherine Rodriguez; Fabio Sánchez; Miguel Urrutia; Alejandro Gaviría
This study identifies the main problems that Colombia faces and the medium and long term policies that it should follows in order to become a developed country. We concentrate on five relevant elements of development: Education, health and demography, poverty and income distribution, labor market and institutions.
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.
Prevalence and correlates of depression in early childhood home visitors serving rural Colombian families
(Research Square (United States), 2023) Catalina Pérez; Raquel Bernal; Mariafernanda Macias; Sandra Barrueco
Abstract Purpose Limited information is available on early childhood provider depression, particularly in lower and middle-income (LMIC) countries, yet evidence from diverse fields indicates that depression negatively affects work functioning. Given extensive investment worldwide in early childhood home visiting programs, understanding home visitor mental health may help improve services for families. The current investigation examined the prevalence and correlates of depression in early childhood home visitors working in rural Colombia. Methods Three hundred and forty-one home visitors (N = 341) completed the Spanish versions of the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) and the Knowledge of Infant Development Inventory , and self-reported socio-demographic and job-related information. Cross-sectional, clustered statistical analyses were employed in STATA Software. Results Thirteen percent of home visitors met the cut off score for depression. Higher home visitor depression was related to maternal depression among beneficiaries. Additionally, depression was higher among home visitors who were older and those who identified their marital status as separated. Depression was lower among home visitors who completed more home visits and those with higher educational attainment. Conclusions Early childhood providers experienced interconnections in their depression with those whom they served. In addition, social environmental factors related to home visitor depression were identified. The results from this study speak to the importance of considering providers’ mental health as part of the effort of disseminating high quality early childhood home visiting programs. Program and clinical implications are further discussed.
¿Unión libre o matrimonio? Efectos en el bienestar de los hijos
(Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012) Diego Amador; Raquel Bernal
En este artículo evaluamos si existen diferencias en las variables de desempeño de niños y adultos entre hogares casados y hogares en unión libre, una vez que se controla por diferencias observadas entre los dos tipos de familias y se controla por posibles problemas de endogeneidad debidos a la autoselección con base en la utilización de la técnica de variables instrumentales. Utilizamos una variedad de bases de datos colombianas que tienen información acerca de variables de desempeño de los niños. Los resultados indican que los hogares en unión libre están peor que los hogares casados en varias dimensiones, incluidas la tenencia de bienes duraderos y el bienestar infantil. Además, intentamos entender las razones por las cuales estas diferencias emergen y encontramos que los hogares en unión libre exhiben comportamientos menos estables, con menor planeación del futuro, se caracterizan por menor especialización y riesgo compartido entre la pareja, y exhiben comportamientos menos saludables y peores prácticas parentales.
Wealth Gradients in Early Childhood Cognitive Development in Five Latin American Countries
(University of Wisconsin Press, 2015) Norbert Schady; Jere R. Behrman; María Caridad Araujo; Rodrigo Azuero; Raquel Bernal; David Nogués‐Bravo; Florencia López Bóo; Karen Macours; Daniela Marshall; Christina Paxson
Research from the United States shows that gaps in early cognitive and non-cognitive ability appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this important question for developing countries. This paper provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive development by socioeconomic status in early childhood for five Latin American countries. To help with comparability, we use the same measure of receptive language ability for all five countries. We find important differences in development in early childhood across countries, and steep socioeconomic gradients within every country. For the three countries where we can follow children over time, there are few substantive changes in scores once children enter school. Our results are robust to different ways of defining socioeconomic status, to different ways of standardizing outcomes, and to selective non-response on our measure of cognitive development.