The Economics of Human Development and Social Mobility

By James J. Heckman, Stefano Mosso. Annual Review of Economics, 2014

942 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility. It summarizes the evidence from diverse literatures on the importance of early life conditions in shaping multiple life skills and the evidence on critical and sensitive investment periods for shaping different skills. It presents economic models that rationalize the evidence and unify the treatment effect and family influence literatures. The evidence on the empirical and policy importance of credit constraints in forming skills is examined. There is little support for the claim that untargeted income transfer policies to poor families significantly boost child outcomes. Mentoring, parenting, and attachment are essential features of successful families and interventions to shape skills at all stages of childhood. The next wave of family studies will better capture the active role of the emerging autonomous child in learning and responding to the actions of parents, mentors and teachers.

Subfields: Education, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/77f13bab50ef0d0d4a3c11946c67e123ac60afda

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Citations in the corpus

Fostering and Measuring Skills: Interventions that Improve Character and Cognition (2013, background): “See Heckman and Mosso (2013) for a more complete discussion of static and dynamic complementarity.”
Is Universal Child Care Leveling the Playing Field? (2015, positive): “It iswidely argued that the early years are a particularly important time for efforts to equalize opportunities, because a good deal of inequality is already apparent by the time children start school, and because children's development may be less amenable to change after they enter school (see e.g”
A Theory of Intergenerational Mobility (2018, positive): “If the market offers disproportionate rewards to high human capital, then even modern societies may develop social classes, with considerable mobility within but not across class boundaries.”
Poverty, depression, and anxiety: Causal evidence and mechanisms (2020, background): “A substantial body of work from other contexts shows that early-childhood investments have large effects on children’s income as adults (97).”
Learning at home during COVID-19: effects on vulnerable young Australians (2020, background): “These deficits in growth and child development are increasingly difficult to remedy beyond the early childhood years (Heckman and Mosso 2014).”
Why Do Wealthy Parents Have Wealthy Children? (2020, positive): “Dohmen, Falk, Huffman, and Sunde, 2012), and a number of studies document the importance of attributes shaped in childhood in determining adult outcomes (Heckman and Mosso 2014).”
The Gender Gap in Mathematics Achievement: Evidence from Italian Data (2016, positive): “As demonstrated by the recent work by Heckman and colleagues (e.g. Heckman and Kautz 2012, 2014; Heckman and Mosso, 2014), non-cognitive abilities including motivation and self-esteem are important predictors of success in life and in the labour market.”