Labor Market Returns to an Early Childhood Stimulation Intervention in Jamaica

By Paul J. Gertler, James J. Heckman, Rodrigo Pinto, A. Zanolini, Christel Vermeerch, S. Walker, Susan M. Chang, S. Grantham‐McGregor. Science, 2014

731 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Help as hungry children helps young adults Supporters of early childhood interventions follow the rule “better early than late,” but so far there's been limited evidence that the rule applies to disadvantaged children in developing countries. Gertler et al. looked at the earnings of young adults in Jamaica, 20 years after, as toddlers, they were given 2 years of help from community health workers. The earnings of the treatment group caught up to those of a comparison group of well-fed children, but the control group of undernourished children that did not receive the health worker visits has lagged behind. Science, this issue p. 998 Encouraging greater mother-child interactions can compensate in the long term for poor nutrition. A substantial literature shows that U.S. early childhood interventions have important long-term economic benefits. However, there is little evidence on this question for developing countries. We report substantial effects on the earnings of participants in a randomized intervention conducted in 1986–1987 that gave psychosocial stimulation to growth-stunted Jamaican toddlers. The intervention consisted of weekly visits from community health workers over a 2-year period that taught parenting skills and encouraged mothers and children to interact in ways that develop cognitive and socioemotional skills. The authors reinterviewed 105 out of 129 study participants 20 years later and found that the intervention increased earnings by 25%, enough for them to catch up to the earnings of a nonstunted comparison group identified at baseline (65 out of 84 participants).

Subfields: Education, Nutrition and Dietetics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d63d44fda65cc82514650d52da3587c8e0189d86

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Citations in the corpus

Realizing the Full Potential of Social Safety Nets in Africa (2018, background): “Social safety nets may be considered an investment in future generations, with potentially large impacts on productivity and growth (Gertler et al. 2014).”
Efficient computation of adjusted p-values for resampling-based stepdown multiple testing (2016, background): “Examples of such papers include Heckman et al. (2010), Hein et al. (2010), Campbell et al. (2014), Gertler et al. (2014), and Dobbie and Fryer (2015).”
THE DETERMINANTS OF HUMAN CAPITAL FORMATION DURING THE EARLY YEARS OF LIFE: THEORY, MEASUREMENT, AND POLICIES (2015, background): “A more recent follow-up (Gertler et al. 2014), at age 22, observed significant effects on earnings, which were increased by 25%, enough for the treated to catch up with the earnings of a nonstunted comparison group.”
Pathways to Education: An Integrated Approach to Helping At-Risk High School Students (2017, positive): “Preschool interventions involving home visits to offer support and advice have proven effective in helping improve human capital among disadvantaged children (Olds et al. 2004; Schweinhart et al. 2005; Gertler et al. 2014; Attanasio et al. 2015).”
The Long-Term Effects of Universal Preschool in Boston (2021, neutral): “Related studies outside the United States include Baker, Gruber, and Mil-ligan (2008), Havnes and Mogstad (2011, 2015), Gertler et al. (2014), Cornelissen et al. (2018), Felfe and Lalive (2018), and Baker, Gruber, and Milligan (2019).”