Human Capital at Home: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in the Philippines

Authors

Noam Angrist
Sarah Kabay
Dean S. Karlan
Lincoln Lau
Kevin M. Wong, Pepperdine UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Streaming Media

Publication Date

9-14-2024

Keywords

human capital, philippines, randomized

Abstract

Children spend most of their time at home in their early years, yet efforts to promote human capital at home in many low- and middle-income settings remain limited. We conduct a randomized controlled trial to evaluate an intervention which encourages parents and caregivers to foster human capital accumulation among their children between ages 3 and 5, with a focus on math and phonics skills. Children gain 0.52 and 0.51 standard deviations relative to the control group on math and phonics tests, respectively (p<0.001). A year later effects persist, but math gains dissipate to 0.15 (p=0.06) and phonics to 0.13 (p=0.12). Effects appear to be mediated largely through instructional support by parents and not other parent investment mechanisms, such as more positive parent-child interactions or additional time spent on education at home beyond the intervention. Our results show that parents can be effective conduits of educational instruction even in low-resource settings.

Publication Title

SSRN

First Page

1

Last Page

37

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4959380

Recommended Citation

Angrist, Noam and Angrist, Noam and Kabay, Sarah and Karlan, Dean S. and Karlan, Dean S. and Lau, Lincoln and Wong, Kevin, Human Capital at Home: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in the Philippines (September 14, 2024). Buffett Institute Global Poverty Research Lab Working Paper (forthcoming), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4959380 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4959380