We develop and estimate a model of child care markets that endogenizes both demand and supply. On the demand side, families with a child make consumption, labor supply, and child-care decisions within a static, unitary household model. On the supply side, child care providers make entry, price,...

This paper examines how rural households cope with climate change related rainfall shocks by re-allocating children's time between domestic activities and school attendance. Households affected by an unanticipated rainfall shock face an inter-temporal trade-off between current household income...

Parenting practices play a crucial role in child development. We evaluate the impact of a free digital stress management and positive parenting intervention designed to reduce the prevalence of child maltreatment in El Salvador. Drawing on the prior success of in-person interventions, we study...

This paper documents disparities in cognitive development-as measured by a receptive vocabulary test-between children from households with high and low socioeconomic status (SES) in two different phases of childhood (before and after early school years) in four developing countries: Peru,...

Gaps in child development by socioeconomic status (SES) start early in life, are large and can increase inequalities later in life. We use recent national-level, cross-sectional and longitudinal data to examine inequalities in child development (namely, language, cognition, and socio-emotional...

Teenage pregnancy in the Dominican Republic represents a persistent development challenge. This paper uses data from a randomized impact evaluation of the youth training program Juventud y Empleo, which includes soft-skills training, to examine its impact on teenage pregnancy. We find that the...

This paper estimates the effect of childcare availability on parents' employment probability using the timing of death of grandmothers-the primary childcare providers in Mexico-as identifying variation. I use a triple-difference to disentangle the effect of coinhabiting grandmothers' deaths due...

Virtually all Latin American and Caribbean countries have established specialized organizations to promote their exports. Existing analyses of these organizations are at best partial and fragmentary. This paper aims at overcoming these limitations of the literature by presenting a consistent,...

The effects of early life circumstances on cognitive skill formation are important for later human capital development, labor market outcomes and well-being. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the first 1,000 days are the critical window for both cognitive skill formation and physical...