In this paper we use high quality data from two developing countries, Ethiopia and Peru, to estimate the production functions of human capital from age 1 to age 15. We characterize the nature of persistence and dynamic complementarities between two components of human capital: health and cognition. We also explore the implications of different functional form assumptions for the production functions. We find that more able and higher income parents invest more, particularly at younger ages when investments have the greatest impacts. These differences in investments by parental income lead to large gaps in inequality by age 8 that persist through age 15.
Authors
CPP Co-Director
Orazio is an International Research Fellow at the IFS, a Professor at Yale and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Research Fellow Yale University
Costas is a Research Fellow of the IFS and a Professor of Economics at Yale University and a Visiting Professor at University College London.
Emily Nix
Research Associate University of Essex
Francesca is an IFS Research Associate, a Research Fellow in the Research Department of the Bank of Italy and also a Research Affiliate at IZA.
Journal article details
- DOI
- 10.1016/j.red.2017.02.002
- Publisher
- Elsevier
- JEL
- J24, I15
- Issue
- Volume 25, April 2017, pages 234-259
Suggested citation
Attanasio, O et al. (2017). 'Human capital growth and poverty: Evidence from Ethiopia and Peru' 25(2017), pp.234–259.
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