RESEARCH PAPERS
RESEARCH PAPERS
(Mis)perceptions about children
Presented at
the 50th Eastern Economic Association Annual Meetings, Boston, 2024;
the 88th Midwest Economic Association Annual Meetings, Chicago, 2024;
the 29th Society of Labor Economists Annual Meeting (poster), Portland, 2024.
In this paper, I quantify how early childhood education teachers’ perceptions of developmental delays are influenced by both a child’s individual development and the average developmental level of other children in the neighbourhood. Using objective non-cognitive (socio-emotional) and cognitive (receptive language) measures from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children, I find that, conditional on a child’s own development, teachers in neighbourhoods with lower average non-cognitive development are less likely to perceive delays in either domain. I also show that mothers’ perceptions of their child’s non-cognitive development are shaped by information provided by teachers. These beliefs matter: both teacher and mother perceptions of developmental delays predict investments in remedial services, including learning and behavioural therapies, tutoring, and the quality of parent-child interactions. Finally, I find that teachers with college degrees are more likely to identify children with low measured development than those with diplomas or certificates.
The evolution of prices and quantities of occupational human capital Submitted
Presented at the 55th Annual Canadian Economics Association Meetings, remote, 2021
I examine the roles of skill- and routine-biased technical change (SBTC and RBTC) in the rising U.S. wage inequality between 1970 and 2022, estimating the evolution of prices and quantities of human capital in occupational groups specializing in abstract, routine, and manual tasks. To quantify changes in prices and quantities of occupation-specific human capital, I use a flat spot price identification method that exploits wage changes for workers approaching retirement to infer shifts in skill prices. Importantly, this method accommodates changes in cohort quality over time, capturing both the effects of shifts in the educational composition of workers in occupations and changes in the quality of education across generations over the study period. The results show that the price for abstract occupations has increased relative to manual and routine occupations, while prices for manual and routine occupations have declined in absolute terms. This evidence supports the role of SBTC in increasing the relative price of high-skill human capital and contradicts the prediction of RBTC increasing the price of manual human capital relative to routine human capital. Moreover, among abstract occupations, professional workers with higher levels of training have disproportionately benefited from the changing relative demand for high-skill workers, compared to those in managerial occupations, further supporting the presence of SBTC.
Presented at the 50th Atlantic Canada Economics Association Meetings, Halifax, 2024
Female-favourable gender gaps in multiple measures of academic achievement, among children and young adults, have increased over recent years. These disparities have been linked to deficits in boys' literacy, which manifest early in childhood and accumulate over time. I investigate the impact of parental time investment decisions on the widening of literacy gaps between boys and girls. I estimate a model of the mother's time investment and child skill accumulation, allowing for gender differences in the literacy production function, initial endowments, and parental preferences for children's human capital. My analysis centers on the development of skills in children aged 6 to 15 as observed in the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children. I document that mothers tend to allocate more time to their daughters, and although my point estimates suggest that these differences in maternal time investment are mainly explained by the mother's preferences for literacy between boys and girls, these estimates are not statistically significant. Overall, my findings suggest that the role of mothers' aggregate time investments in the expansion of literacy deficits may be limited, and this expansion is driven by productivity differences unrelated to aggregate time investment.