The literature on skill formation and human capital development clearly demonstrates that early investment in children is an equitable and efficient policy with large returns in adulthood. Yet little is known about the mechanisms involved in producing these long-term effects. This paper presents...

IQ tests and achievement tests do not capture non-cognitive skills — personality traits, goals, character and motivations that are valued in the labour market, in school and elsewhere. For many outcomes, their predictive power rivals or exceeds that of cognitive skills. Skills are stable...

The literature on skill formation and human capital development clearly demonstrates that early investment in children is an equitable and efficient policy with large returns in adulthood. Yet little is known about the mechanisms involved in producing these long-term effects. This paper presents...

The literature on skill formation and human capital development clearly demonstrates that early investment in children is an equitable and efficient policy with large returns in adulthood. Yet little is known about the mechanisms involved in producing these long-term effects. This paper presents...

This paper uses random assignment to estimate the causal impacts on child skills of a widely emulated early childhood home visiting program. We show the feasibility of replicating it at scale. We estimate vectors of latent skills for individual children and compare treatments and controls. The...