Behrman, Jere R
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Publication Financial Literacy, Schooling, and Wealth Accumulation(2010-09-28) Behrman, Jere R; Mitchell, Olivia S; Soo, Cindy; Bravo, DavidFinancial literacy and schooling attainment have been linked to household wealth accumulation. Yet prior findings may be biased due to noisy measures of financial literacy and schooling, as well as unobserved factors such as ability, intelligence, and motivation that could enhance financial literacy and schooling but also directly affect wealth accumulation. Here we use a new household dataset and an instrumental variables approach to isolate the causal effects of financial literacy and schooling on wealth accumulation. While financial literacy and schooling attainment are both strongly positively associated with wealth outcomes in linear regression models, our approach reveals even stronger and larger effects of financial literacy on wealth. It also indicates no significant positive effects of schooling attainment conditional on financial literacy in a linear specification, but positive effects when interacted with financial literacy. Estimated impacts are substantial enough to suggest that investments in financial literacy could have large positive payoffs.Publication Does Sorting Matter for Learning Inequality? Evidence from East Africa(2019-12-01) Anand, Paul; Behrman, Jere R.; Dang, Hai-Anh H.; Jones, SamInequalities in children’s learning are widely recognized to arise from variations in both household and school-related factors. While few studies have considered the role of sorting between schools and households, even fewer have quantified how much sorting contributes to educational inequalities in low- and middle-income countries. We fill this gap using data on over 1 million children from three East African countries. Applying a novel variance decomposition procedure, our results indicate that sorting of pupils across schools accounts for at least 8 percent of the total test-score variance, equivalent to half a year of schooling or more. This contribution tends to be largest for children from families at the ends of the socio-economic spectrum. Empirical simulations of steady-state educational inequalities reveal that policies to mitigate the consequences of sorting could substantially reduce inequalities in education.Publication Gender targeting of unconditional income transfers and child nutritional status: Experimental evidence from the Bolivian Amazon(2014-02-14) Undurraga, Eduardo; Zycherman, Ariela; Yiu, Julie; Behrman, Jere R; Leonard, William R.; Godoy, Ricardo A.Observational studies suggest that women’s income benefits children’s health and nutritional status, as well as education, more than men’s income, apparently because women are more likely to shift marginal resources to their children. These studies have influenced policies such as conditional cash transfers, which typically target women. However, previous studies have been unable to control for unobserved heterogeneity in child endowments and parental preferences. We report the results of a trial that allocated randomly one-time in-kind income in the form of edible rice (the main staple and cash crop in the study area) or rice seeds to the female or male household head (edible rice transfers, range: 30-395 kg/household; rice seeds: 5.9 kg/household). The trial took place in a society of native Amazonian forager-farmers in Bolivia (2008-2009). Outcomes included four anthropometric indicators of short-run nutritional status of 848 children from 40 villages. We found that the transfers produced no discernible impact on short-run (~5 months) nutritional status of children, or any differential effects between girls and boys by the gender of the household head who received the transfers. These null results probably relate to specific social norms of the Tsimane’, such as pooling of food resources, shared preferences, and relatively equal bargaining power between Tsimane’ women and men. The results highlight the probable importance of culture in household resource allocation and suggest that gender targeting in cash transfer programs might not increase investments in children in societies where women and men have more egalitarian household relationshipsPublication In-law Resources and Distribution Within Marriage(1998-09-01) Behrman, Jere R; Rosenzweig, Mark R.There has been increased attention in recent years to decision-making within the context of multi-member households in which individual members differ in their preferences. Two implications of various alternative specifications of the non-unitary household framework that highlight optimization by individuals have received particular attention and have important implications for the design and consequences of programs that seek to influence resource allocations via income transfers. The first is that the distribution of resources within the household may depend on who in the household receives income transfers. Recent changes in family welfare rules in England, which mandated a shift in the payments of family allowances to married couples from husbands to wives, is an example of a social policy attentive to the proposition that households engage in non-unitary decision-making (Lundberg, Pollak and Wales (1997)).Publication The Impact of Nutrition during Early Childhood on Education among Guatemalan Adults(2006-08-15) Maluccio, John A; Hoddinott, John F; Behrman, Jere R; Martorell, Reynaldo; Quisumbing, Agnes R; Stein, Aryeh D.Early childhood nutrition is thought to have important effects on education, broadly defined to include various forms of learning. We advance beyond previous literature on the effect of early childhood nutrition on education in developing countries by using unique longitudinal data begun during a nutritional experiment during early childhood with educational outcomes measured in adulthood. Estimating an intent-to-treat model capturing the effect of exposure to the intervention from birth to 36 months, our results indicate significantly positive, and fairly substantial, effects of the randomized nutrition intervention a quarter century after it ended: increased grade attainment by women (1.2 grades) via increased likelihood of completing primary school and some secondary school; speedier grade progression by women; a one-quarter SD increase in a test of reading comprehension with positive effects found for both women and men; and a one-quarter SD increase on nonverbal cognitive tests scores. There is little evidence of heterogeneous impacts with the exception being that exposure to the intervention had a larger effect on grade attainment and reading comprehension scores for females in wealthier households. The findings are robust to an array of alternative estimators of the standard errors and controls for sample attrition.Publication Cohort Profile: The Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH)(2013-07-31) KOHLER, HANS-PETER; Watkins, Susan C.; Behrman, Jere R; Kohler, Iliana V.; Anglewicz, Philip; Fleming, Peter; Thornton, Rebecca L.; Mkandawire, James; Kalilani-Phiri, Linda; Honde, Hastings; Hawara, Augustine; Chilima, Ben; Bandawe, Chiwoza; Mwapasa, Victor; MLSFH Study Team,The Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH) is one of very few long-standing publicly-available longitudinal cohort studies in a sub-Saharan African (SSA) context. It provides a rare record of more than a decade of demographic, socioeconomic and health conditions in one of the world's poorest countries. With data collection rounds in 1998, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2012 for up to 4,000 individuals, the MLSFH permits researchers to investigate the multiple influences that contribute to HIV risks in sexual partnerships, the variety of ways that people manage risk within and outside of marriage, the possible effects of HIV prevention policies and programs, and the mechanisms through which poor rural individuals, families, households, and communities cope with the impacts of high morbidity and mortality that are often---but not always---related to HIV/AIDS. The MLSFH been used to document (i) the influence of social networks on HIV-related behaviors and perceptions, (ii) the HIV prevention strategies employed by individuals in rural high-HIV prevalence contexts, (iii) the relationship between life-course transitions and HIV infection risks, (iv) the acceptability of HIV testing and counseling (HTC) and the consequences of HTC on subsequent behaviors, and (v) the health and well-being across the life-course of individuals facing multiple challenges resulting from high disease burdens and widespread poverty.Publication What Determines Adult Cognitive Skills? Impacts of Pre-Schooling, Schooling and Post-Schooling Experiences in Guatemala(2006-10-27) Behrman, Jere R; Hoddinott, John F; Maluccio, John A; Soler-Hampejsek, Erica; Behrman, Emily L.; Martorell, Reynaldo; Ramirez-Zea, Manuel; Stein, Aryeh D.Most investigations of the importance of and the determinants of adult cognitive skills assume that (a) they are produced primarily by schooling and (b) schooling is statistically predetermined. But these assumptions may lead to misleading inferences about impacts of schooling and of pre-schooling and post-schooling experiences on adult cognitive skills. This study uses an unusually rich longitudinal data set collected over 35 years in Guatemala to investigate production functions for adult (i) reading-comprehension and (ii) nonverbal cognitive skills as dependent on behaviorally-determined pre-schooling, schooling and post-schooling experiences. Major results are: (1) Schooling has significant and substantial impact on adult reading comprehension (but not on adult nonverbal cognitive skills)—but estimates of this impact are biased upwards substantially if there are no controls for behavioral determinants of schooling in the presence of persistent unobserved factors such as genetic endowments and/or if family background factors that appear to be correlated with genetic endowments are included among the first-stage instruments. (2) Both pre-schooling and post-schooling experiences have substantial significant impacts on one or both of the adult cognitive skill measures that tend to be underestimated if these pre- and post-schooling experiences are treated as statistically predetermined—in contrast to the upward bias for schooling, which suggests that the underlying physical and job-related components of genetic endowments are negatively correlated with those for cognitive skills. (3) The failure in most studies to incorporate pre- and post-schooling experiences in the analysis of adult cognitive skills or outcomes affected by adult cognitive skills is likely to lead to misleading over-emphasis on schooling relative to these pre-and post-schooling experiences. (4) Gender differences in the coefficients of the adult cognitive skills production functions are not significant, suggesting that most of the fairly substantial differences in adult cognitive skills favoring males on average originate from gender differences in schooling attainment and in experience in skilled jobs favoring males. These four sets of findings are of substantial interest in themselves. But they also have important implications for broader literatures, reinforcing the importance of early life investments in disadvantaged children in determining adult skills and options, pointing to limitations in the cross-country growth literature of using schooling of adults to represent human capital, supporting hypotheses about the importance of childhood nutrition and work complexity in explaining the “Flynn effect” of substantial increases in measured cognitive skills over time, and questioning the interpretation of studies that report productivity impacts of cognitive skills without controlling for the endogeneity of such skills.Publication The Social and the Sexual: Networks in Contemporary Demographic Research(2013-01-18) Kohler, Hans-Peter; Helleringer, Stéphane; Behrman, Jere R.; Watkins, Susan C.The analysis of networks has become an important theme in contemporary demographic research in both developed and developing countries, including investigations of the determinants of fertility behaviors, the interaction between social network and social structures and population policies, the role of intergenerational networks in aging societies, and the relevance for sexual networks for the spread of HIV AIDS. This paper reviews the current research on networks across several domains in demographic research, and it discusses some of the specific challenges of network-based approaches with respect to data collection, analytic approaches and methodologies, interpretation of results, and micro-to-macro aggregation by drawing on research conducted as part of the Kenyan Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (KDICP), the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH) and the Likoma Network Study (LNS).Publication Perception of HIV risk and the quantity and quality of children: The case of rural Malawi(2010-11-29) Castro, Ruben; Behrman, Jere R; Kohler, Hans-PeterThe empirical literature on HIV and the quality (Q) and quantity (N) of children generally reports negative associations for Q and unclear associations for N. We focus our analysis on the effects of HIV, as a predictor of mother and child mortality, on investments in child Q and N. We develop a Q-N model within which higher mothers’ mortality predicts lower N while higher child mortality predicts lower Q. Those effects together make reasonable the expectation of negative influences of higher HIV likelihood on child Q and N. Based on longitudinal micro data on mothers and their children in rural Malawi we find that variation in mothers’ reported HIV risk reduces both child quality, as reflected in children’s schooling and health, and child quantity, when the perceived risk is already moderate or high. The effects are sizable, and, in the case of Q (schooling and health) are found in children and teenagers, as well as boys and girls, while in the case of N are found for young and mature women.Publication Early-Childhood Growth Faltering, Post-Infancy Recovery and Educational Outcomes in Late Childhood: Evidence from Vietnam(2014-03-10) Behrman, Jere R; Duc, Le ThucWe use longitudinal data on over 1,500 children born in 2001 in Vietnam to study the impact of early childhood stunting on height, lagging in schooling progression and cognitive outcomes in late childhood (age 8-10 years). Our preferred estimates utilize 2SLS estimators to control for the endogenous determination of early childhood stunting and also include control for child sex and birth order, mother’s height and BMI, household socioeconomic status, and community characteristics. These estimates indicate that deficits in height-for-age at age 12 months have negative impacts on height in late childhood but not on schooling and cognitive outcomes in late childhood. The children who were stunted or moderately stunted at age 12 months display significant catch-up growth, recovering half of their deficits in height-for-age by age 8 years. Socioeconomic status in infancy has negative effects on both stunting in infancy and poor subsequent educational outcomes in late childhood, which result in significant associations between stunting in infancy and some subsequent educational outcomes in late childhood – but not causal effects once there is control for the endogenous determination of early childhood height deficits.