Household decision making and child development

"Economics and Measurement: New measures to model decision making" by Ingvild Almås, Orazio Attanasio, and Pamela Jervis, NBER Working Paper No. 30839, conditionally accepted in Econometrica.

Most empirical work in economics has considered only a narrow set of measures as meaningful and useful to characterize individual behavior, a restriction justified by the difficulties in collecting a wider set. However, this approach often forces the use of strong assumptions to estimate the parameters that inform individual behavior and identify causal links. In this paper, we argue that a more flexible and broader approach to measurement could be extremely useful and allow the estimation of richer and more realistic models that rest on weaker identifying assumptions. We argue that the design of measurement tools should interact with, and depend on, the models economists use. Measurement is not a substitute for rigorous theory, it is an important complement to it, and should be developed in parallel to it. We illustrate these arguments with a model of parental behavior estimated on pilot data that combines conventional measures with novel ones.

Project: Kizazi Kijacho ("The Next Generation”)

Poor developmental outcomes for children under five can last a lifetime and perpetuate an inter-generational cycle of poverty and marginalization. The need for action is widely recognized, but it is not yet matched by a requisite understanding of the process of and barriers to improving child development at scale in low-and middle-income country (LMIC) settings.