Emla Fitzsimons is a Professor of Economics at the UCL Institute of Education and a Research Fellow, attached to the Centre for Evaluation of Development Policy at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. She worked at the IFS for 14 years prior to taking up the position of Professor of Economics and Director of the Millennium Cohort Study at the Institute of Education.
Her research on early childhood aims at understanding how early experiences and parental investments affect longer-term outcomes. For instance, she is using the Millennium Cohort Study to understand the impacts of breastfeeding on outcomes later on in childhood. She led a project in Colombia that implemented and evaluated a home visiting programme, with the aim of surveying the children through time and understanding the longer term effects of the programme. She has extensive research analysing how policies affect young people's schooling and labour market choices – including programmes in the UK and Colombia providing subsidies to stay on in post-compulsory schooling, and the system of higher education finance in the UK
Education
PhD Economics, University College London, 2004
Higher Diploma (First Class Honours) Education, University College Dublin, 1997
MA (First Class Honours) Economics, University College Dublin, 1996
Bachelor (Second Class Honours) Actuarial and Financial Studies , University College Dublin, 1995
Through the lottery of birth, children are born into different socio-economic circumstances and grow up in environments that are remarkably different from each other. This report looks at inequalities in early childhood in the UK.
We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to significant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disavantaged children aged 12 to 24 months at baseline.
We have established a new partnership between academics, local government and early years practitioners to develop, implement and evaluate a home-visiting programme for parents with very young children in England. In this feasibility study, we research local priorities and existing services to evaluate the need for a new early childhood intervention in England.
We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to signi cant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children aged 12 to 24 months at baseline.
This paper studies the relationship between group size and informal risk sharing. It shows that under limited commitment with coalitional deviations, this relationship is theoretically ambiguous.
This paper uses data from a cluster randomised trial of a participatory learning and action cycle (PLA) through women’s groups, to assess the role of extended family networks as a determinant of gains in health knowledge and health practice.
Poor early childhood development (ECD) in low- and middle-income countries is a major concern. There are calls to universalise access to ECD interventions through integrating them into existing government services but little evidence on the medium- or long-term effects of such scalable models.
We examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to signi cant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children aged 12 to 24 months at baseline. We estimate the determinants of material and time investments in these children and evaluate the im- pact of the treatment on such investments. We then estimate the production functions for cognitive and socio-emotional skills. The e ects of the program can be explained by increases in parental investments, which have strong e ects on outcomes and are complementary to both maternal skills and child's baseline skills.
Community-based interventions, particularly group-based ones, are considered to
be a cost-effective way of delivering interventions in low-income settings. However,
design features of these programs could also influence dimensions of household and
community behaviour beyond those targeted by the intervention. This paper studies
spillover effects of a participatory community health intervention in rural Malawi,
implemented through a cluster randomised control trial, on an outcome not directly
targeted by the intervention: household consumption smoothing after crop losses.
This paper studies the effects of a randomized intervention in rural Malawi that provided mothers of young infants with information on child nutrition. The intervention improved child nutrition, household food consumption and consequently health. We find evidence that labor supply also increased.
The objective of this paper is to understand and test empirically the relationship between group size and informal risk sharing. Models of informal risk sharing with limited commitment and grim-trigger punishments upon deviation imply that larger groups provide better informal insurance.
The authors examine the channels through which a randomized early childhood intervention in Colombia led to significant gains in cognitive and socio-emotional skills among a sample of disadvantaged children.
The authors present evidence from a randomised field experiment in rural Mongolia to assess the poverty impacts of a joint-liability microcredit program targeted at women.
Understanding how higher education (HE) finance policy can affect HE decisions is important for understanding how governments can promote human capital accumulation.
