Seminario de Microeconomía Aplicada - Mother care vs incubators, Early Childhood Health Interventions and The Formation of Socioemotional Skills

Darwin Cortés: es economista de la Universidad del Rosario, magister en economía de la Universidad Nacional del Colombia, Master y doctor en economía de la Universidad de Toulouse, Francia. Es profesor asociado de la facultad de economía de la Universidad del Rosario. Tiene intereses de investigación en temas de educación, salud y empleo.

Resumen del documento: In this paper, we compare two very early health interventions to analyze how early interventions might have long-run impacts on socio-emotional skills. We exploit a Randomized Controlled Trial that assigned premature babies to incubators (TC) or Mother Care (KMC). KMC induces parents to share time with their children. We find that KMC parents have better parenting capacities one year after, and children show less aggressive behavior twenty years later. A mediation analysis shows that between 50\% and 80\% of the total effect is mediated by improvements in parenting capacity. Posterior analysis shows that this result is reflected in a reduction of a third of the prevalence of school violent behavior. We also show that KMC parents know their children better twenty years after. It provides compelling evidence that parental time investments during early childhood improve parents' knowledge of children and make them improve their posterior investments. Parenting time is key to reducing aggressive behaviors.

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Tiempo de exposición: 1:30 p. m. a 3:00 p. m.