CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Burlacu, Sergiu Constantin |
|---|---|
| Title | The impact of early childhood parenting practices on skills development. Evidence from Hungary |
| Summary | Using a rich longitudinal dataset following 10,000 students, this thesis investigates the impact of early childhood parental investment on socio-emotional and cognitive skills, and health during adolescence and early adulthood. Early childhood is a very salient development stage with very high potential returns on investment. However, the mechanisms behind are still not very well understood: how skills interact, how parents make investment decisions or what is the optimal timing and type of intervention to promote the growth of a certain skill. I estimate OLS and IV models where I control for socio-economic status and early childhood health. Early childhood investment is instrumented through birth order and whether a parent/stepparent left/joined the household during early childhood. The IV strategy indicates a significant downward bias in the OLS model suggesting that parents compensate for unobserved shocks in the development of the child. The estimates indicate that early childhood investment is strongly associated with socio-emotional skills and academic achievement, but less with mathematics test scores and health. Furthermore, I find some evidence that time investments matter more for socio-emotional skills while material investment are more important for cognitive skills, and that early health strongly predicts skills during adolescence. Finally, I find that after controlling for socio-economic status and early childhood health, there is no difference in socio-emotional skills or parental investment between Roma and non-Roma students. |
| Supervisor | Kezdi, Gabor |
| Department | Economics MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/burlacu_sergiu.pdf |
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