Would greater household wealth make young children smarter?

Pham, Thai Minh and Tran, Tuyen Quang (2021): Would greater household wealth make young children smarter? Published in: Children & Society No. https://doi.org/10.1111/chso.12448 (31 March 2021): pp. 1-15.

Abstract

Drawing on the Young Lives data obtained from three cycles of surveys from 2006 to 2016, our study examines factors affecting children’s cognitive ability in Vietnam. Controlling for the conditional wealth, which is the residual of the regression equation of the household wealth index in 2006 and 2013, our study provides evidence that conditional wealth has an effect of increasing the cognitive capacity of 15-year-old children, manifested in all three methods of measurement: by vocabulary points, math scores and reading comprehension scores in Vietnamese. This finding once again confirms that late intervention after the first 1,000 days has a positive impact on children's cognitive ability. Notably, our finding suggests that using the conditional wealth enables to capture the impact of economic shocks, which in turn have a significant effect on the cognitive ability of children in Vietnam.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: household wealth; conditional wealth; cognitive skills; the gender gap
• Subjects: D - Microeconomics > D1 - Household Behavior and Family Economics; D - Microeconomics > D1 - Household Behavior and Family Economics > D10 - General; D - Microeconomics > D1 - Household Behavior and Family Economics > D13 - Household Production and Intrahousehold Allocation; D - Microeconomics > D6 - Welfare Economics; D - Microeconomics > D6 - Welfare Economics > D62 - Externalities; D - Microeconomics > D6 - Welfare Economics > D63 - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement

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