Worldwide, 250 million children under five (43 percent) are not meeting their developmental potential because they lack adequate nutrition and cognitive stimulation in early childhood. Several parent support programs have shown significant benefits for children's development, but the programs...

In many low- and middle-income countries, young children learn a mother tongue or indigenous language at home before entering the formal education system where they will need to understand and speak a country's official language(s). Thus, assessments of children before school age, conducted in a...

This paper models household investments in young children when parents and older siblings share caregiving responsibilities and when investments by older siblings contribute to young children's human capital accumulation. To test the predictions of the model, the paper estimates the impact of...

Languages use different systems for classifying nouns. Gender languages assign many-sometimes all-nouns to distinct sex-based categories, masculine and feminine. Drawing on a broad range of historical and linguistic sources, this paper constructs a measure of the proportion of each country's...