"Human Capital at Home: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in the Ph" by Noam Angrist, Sarah Kabay et al.
 

Education Division Scholarship

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

Document Type

Article

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Publication Date

3-17-2025

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). We also measure impacts on parents, including both fathers and mothers. 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. We also do not find any crowd-out effects on labor market outcomes, likely since the approach tested is highly efficient, delivering large learning gains in a short period of time. Our results show that parents can be effective conduits of educational instruction even in low-resource settings.

Publication Title

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

First Page

1

Last Page

17

DOI

http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5181310

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