Soraya Adiva Román Eyzaguirre.
04/09/2017
Orientador: Juliano Assunção.
Banca: Cecilia Machado. Gabriel Ulyssea. Joana Simões de Melo Costa. Pedro Carvalho Loureiro de Souza.
Essays on culture and early childhood
Nível: Doutorado
This thesis contains three essays on culture and early childhood. The first essay studies the effect of ethnic beliefs/preferences on breastfeeding practices in Peru and Bolivia. Comparing the breastfeeding practices of rural-to-urban migrants and their descendants by ethnicity, we find that Aymara indigenous mothers breastfeed longer than non-indigenous ones. The evidence suggests that vertical transmission of breastfeeding beliefs occurs essentially through female family members, and that breastfeeding differences are larger in regions where Indigenous and Non-indigenous people historically lived longer together. The latter is consistent with cultural distinction theory.
The second essay investigates the effect of Chile crece Contigo - ChCC hereinafter -, a national-scale early childhood development policy implemented in Chile. The policy intended to improve children development by enhancing children's family environment and parents’ childcare abilities. Consistent with the policy objectives, we show that ChCC increased parental time investment and children cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Parents spend more time doing activities that foster children skills, such as reading, drawing, singing, visiting the park, etc. This is associated with greater psycho-motor skills in children under two, and greater vocabulary and better external behaviour in children between three to four years of age.
The third essay delves on the effect of ChCC using the human skill formation model of Cunha and Heckman (2006). We estimate a production function of skills for pre- and post-ChCC cohorts, and find that for children under two years of age the improvement in cognitive and non-cognitive skills is not only associated with an increase in parental investment but also an increase in the average marginal product of this variable.
