Title
Psychosocial status and cognitive achievement in Peru
Date Issued
01 November 2018
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Publisher(s)
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Abstract
This paper assesses the importance of psychosocial status in the accumulation of cognitive skills during the transition from mid to late childhood. We use longitudinal data from a cohort of 700 Peruvian children drawn from a very rich dataset, the Young Lives Survey, to test the impact of children's perception of respect at the age of 8 on cognitive achievement 4 years later, controlling for cognitive skills at the age of 8, lagged child and household characteristics, and community fixed effects. This empirical specification is akin to estimating a conditional demand function for cognitive skills, which deals with some of the main pitfalls of skill endogeneity. We find that poorly respected children are linked to a lower rate of cognitive accumulation than their better-respected counterparts. As expected, we also find that previously accumulated cognitive skills enable higher subsequent cognitive skill accumulation. We go one step further by testing and finding evidence of complementarities across skills. We show that cognitive differences amplify over time between children with low and high psychosocial skills. Overall, our results suggest that psychosocial status, an aspect little studied in the context of developing countries, plays an important role in the acquisition of cognitive skills during childhood.
Start page
1536
End page
1560
Volume
22
Issue
4
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Psicología (incluye relaciones hombre-máquina)
Economía
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85047473682
Source
Review of Development Economics
ISSN of the container
13636669
Source funding
UNICEF
Sponsor(s)
This research was partially funded by an student grant from the Oxford Department of International Development (Young Lives Study)
We thank Diego Santa Maria and Alessandra Hidalgo for superb research assistance. We are also grateful to Jere Behrman, Laura Camfield, and Santiago Cueto for providing helpful comments on an earlier draft, and to three referees providing extensive comments during refereeing for this journal. This research was funded by Young Lives (www.younglives.org.uk), a longitudinal study investigating the changing nature of childhood poverty. Young Lives is core-funded by the Department for International Development (DFID), with sub-studies funded by IDRC (in Ethiopia), UNICEF (India), the Bernard van Leer Foundation (in India and Peru) and Irish Aid (in Vietnam).
Funding Information This research was partially funded by an student grant from the Oxford Department of International Development (Young Lives Study) We thank Diego Santa Maria and Alessandra Hidalgo for superb research assistance. We are also grateful to Jere Behrman, Laura Camfield, and Santiago Cueto for providing helpful comments on an earlier draft, and to three referees providing extensive comments during refereeing for this journal. This research was funded by Young Lives (www.younglives.org.uk), a longitudinal study investigating the changing nature of childhood poverty. Young Lives is core-funded by the Department for International Development (DFID), with sub-studies funded by IDRC (in Ethiopia), UNICEF (India), the Bernard van Leer Foundation (in India and Peru) and Irish Aid (in Vietnam). The views expressed here are those of the author. They are not necessarily those of the Young Lives project, the University of Oxford, DFID, or other funders.
Sources of information:
Directorio de Producción Científica
Scopus