Paxson, Christina, and Norbert Schady. 2007. “Cognitive Development among Young Children in Ecuador: The Roles of Wealth, Health, and Parenting.” Journal of Human Resources 42(1): 49–84.
We examine the relationship between early cognitive development, socioeconomic status (SES), child health, and parenting quality in a developing country. We use a sample of more than 3,000 predominantly poor preschoolaged children from Ecuador, and analyze determinants of their scores on a widely used test of language ability. We find that household wealth and parental education are associated with higher scores, and that these associations are larger among older children. Child health and measures of parenting quality are associated with test performance, and account for a fraction, although not the majority, of the association between SES and cognitive development.
Christina Paxson is a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University. Norbert Schady is a Senior Economist at the World Bank. They acknowledge the collaboration at every stage of this project with their colleagues at the Secretaría Técnica del Frente Social in Ecuador, in particular Santiago Izquierdo, Mauricio León, Ruth Lucio, Juan Ponce, José Rosero and Yajaira Vázquez. They also thank Harold Alderman, María Caridad Araujo, Pedro Carneiro, Jishnu Das, Daniel Dulitzky, Lant Pritchett, Carolina Sánchez-Páramo, three anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the Inter-American Development Bank, Princeton University, Swarthmore College, and the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Conference held in Paris on October 27–29, 2005 for their comments. Tom Vogl provided excellent research assistance. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning August 2007 through July 2010 from Norbert Schady, World Bank, nschady@worldbank.org.