This paper introduces the EJ Symposium on Child Development by reviewing the literature and placing the contributions of the papers in the Symposium in the context of a vibrant literature.

This chapter presents an economic approach to character and personality traits with an application to the study of virtue. Economists interpret psychological traits, including character traits and virtue, as strategies that shape responses to situations (actions) determined by underlying...

This paper is the first to estimate a causal effect of immigrant students' reading performance on their math performance. To overcome endogeneity issues due to unobserved ability, we apply an IV approach exploiting variation in age-at-arrival and the linguistic distance between origin and...

This paper distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility. It summarizes the evidence from diverse literatures on the importance of early life conditions in shaping multiple life skills and the evidence on critical and sensitive investment periods...

Understanding inequality and devising policies to alleviate it was a central focus of Jan Tinbergen's lifetime research. He was far ahead of his time in many aspects of his work. This essay places his work in the perspective of research on inequality in his time and now, focusing on his studies...

This study explores relationships between parental resource trajectories and child development, and their implications for intergenerational mobility. By modifying the child skill formation technology to incorporate new skills during adolescence, we analyze the importance of the timing of family...

Using administrative data merged with a rich student survey collected during the summer of 2020, we document the immediate and short-term educational, financial, and personal burdens of New York city's low-income public university students during the COVID-19 pandemic, the closing of college...

This paper studies intergenerational mobility—the transmission of family influence. We develop and estimate measures of lifetime resources (income and wealth) motivated by economic theory that account for generational differences in life-cycle trajectories, uncertainty, and credit constraints....

This paper presents a new approach to measuring the intergenerational transmission of well-being and a novel perspective on which measures and what age ranges to use to estimate intergenerational social mobility. We select the measures and the age ranges that best predict important human capital...