In this paper we study the process of children's skill formation. The identification of this process is challenging … because children's skills are observed only through arbitrarily scaled and imperfect measures. Using a dynamic la- tent factor …. Moreover, we find that the marginal productivity of early investments is substantially higher for children with lower existing …

We study whether and how parents interfere paternalistically in their children’s intertemporal decision-making. Based … on experiments with over 2,000 members of 610 families, we find that parents anticipate their children’s present bias and … aim to mitigate it. Using a novel method to measure parental interference, we show that more than half of all parents are …

are consistent with these grades being insufficiently salient for students to alter actual student behaviors …

- on school performance. We combine data from the National Educational Panel Study covering 5348 primary school students …

A recent and growing area of research applies latent factor models to study the development of children's skills. Some …