PRESENTADOR: Gabriel Romero (Universitat de les Illes Balears)
Gabriel Romero es Profesor Titular en el Departamento de Economía Aplicada de la Universitat de les Illes Balears (UIB), en Palma de Mallorca, España. Tiene un PhD en Economía por la Universidad de Alicante y es Licenciado en Economía por la Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC). Ha dictado cursos de grado y posgrado en la UIB y en la Universidad de Santiago de Chile. Sus investigaciones se centran en temas de economía de la educación y economía de la salud, migraciones internacionales y economía política. Sus trabajos han sido publicados en revistas académicas internacionales como Economics and Human Biology, Quantitative Economics, Journal of Economics, PLoS ONE, European Journal of Political Economy, Applied Economics Letters y The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy.

ABSTRACT: This paper studies the factors shaping children’s health, cognitive skills, and socio-emotional development and, within this broader framework, evaluates Chile Crece Contigo, a comprehensive early childhood policy implemented nationwide in Chile. We combine administrative data on the staggered municipal rollout of the program and the local provision of parenting workshops with longitudinal data from the Encuesta Longitudinal de Primera Infancia (ELPI). To account for the latent and multidimensional nature of human capital, we estimate a production function that jointly models children’s health, cognitive and socio-emotional skills, parental investments, maternal human capital, and health at birth using multiple noisy measures. Our results reveal substantial self-productivity across all three dimensions of child development and show that maternal human capital and parental investments contribute to skill formation, although the role of investment is concentrated primarily in cognitive development. The estimated interactions also provide evidence of complementarity between prior child skills and parental investment. Regarding the policy, gestational exposure to Chile Crece Contigo improves health at birth, with the largest gains concentrated in the lower tail of the distribution, and produces significant improvements in children’s socio-emotional skills. By contrast, we find no statistically significant effects on subsequent cognitive skills or physical health. Participation in parenting workshops is positively but imprecisely associated with parental investment. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of initial conditions, family inputs, and comprehensive early-life policies in shaping multidimensional child development.

AUTORES: Marisa Hidalgo-Hidalgo (Universidad Pablo de Olavide) & Gabriel Romero (Universitat de les Illes Balears)

ORGANIZADORES: Departamento de Economía, Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas y Revista Económica

CONTACTO: iie@econo.unlp.edu.ar