Working papers

Child Development, Parental Investments, and Social Capital (Job Market Paper)

This paper examines the impact of social capital on child development. Social capital reflects neighborhood connectedness and neighbors' engagement in child support and monitoring. I measure social capital using a novel neighborhood survey from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods with a latent factor model. To study the roles of social capital and parental investments in skill development within a unified framework, I estimate a dynamic skill production function for children aged 6-15. Leveraging a natural experiment from the Chicago public housing demolition, I find that social capital is important for both cognitive and socio-emotional skills. Parental investments are effective for cognitive skills during these ages. Counterfactual experiments suggest that increasing social capital levels in low-socioeconomic-status (SES) neighborhoods to those in high-SES neighborhoods could reduce the skill gap between high-SES and low-SES children by 25% for cognitive skills and 80% for socio-emotional skills.

Middle Childhood Development: Parental Investments, School Quality, and Genetic Influences, with Sarah Cattan (A revised draft will be available soon)

In this paper, we examine how parental investments, school quality, and genetics influence child development. Specifically, we estimate skill production functions for both cognitive and socio-emotional skills at ages 7 and 11. We implement an instrumental variable approach and leverage information from school application portfolios to address the potential endogeneity of parental investments and school quality. Genetic propensities are measured using polygenic scores for educational attainment. Using data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study, we find distinct effects: parental investments improve skills at age 7 but have no impact by age 11, whereas school quality boosts both cognitive and socio-emotional skills at age 11. Genetic factors are positively associated with both skill types, contributing approximately one-third to one-fifth of the effect size of parental investments.

Selected Work in progress

Adapting to Climate Change with Migration: Tropical Cyclones and Human Capital Accumulation, with Siu Yuat Wong

The Philippines faces an annual average of ten tropical cyclones, five of which cause significant destruction. Climate change intensifies cyclones due to warmer waters. This paper identifies the impacts of tropical cyclones on children’s human capital accumulation and studies whether parental migration, acting as a form of insurance, can alleviate the negative impacts of cyclones in the Philippines. Using a panel dataset on migrant households, we estimate a dynamic model of parental migration and education investment, with an embedded education production function for children. We incorporate four mechanisms through which cyclones may impact a child’s educational outcomes into the model: income loss, changes in parents’ time inputs due to local employment loss or temporary out-migration, school disruptions, and health-related consequences. This approach allows us to disentangle and quantify the effects of each mechanism, as well as assess the potential of migration as a buffer. We aim to offer insights for policy recommendations to improve children's education outcomes amid cyclones.

Gene-environment Interaction Effects: Evidence from Early Childhood Programs, with Sarah Cattan