What Matter for Child Development?

• Main Author: HUANG, Fali
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2006
• Subjects: child development; tree regression method; panel data; Behavioral Economics; Education
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/907; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soe_research/article/1906/viewcontent/child_development.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This paper estimates production functions of child cognitive and social development using a panel data of nine-year old children each with over two hundred home and school inputs as well as family background variables. A tree regression method is used to conduct estimation under various speci…cations. A small subset of inputs is found consistently important in explaining variances of child development results, including the number of books a child has at various ages and how often a mother reads to child by age …ve, while the e¤ects of race and maternal employment are negligible when detailed inputs are controlled.