HCEO

HCEO members Pietro Biroli, Kevin Thom, Titus Galama and coauthors find strong relationships between polygenic scores and later-life socioeconomic, anthropometric, health and behavioral outcomes. They find the same for SES status, but find no evidence of sizable gene-environment interactions.

Sources of Inequality at Birth: The Interplay Between Genes and Parental Socioeconomic Status | HCEO Author(s) Pietro Biroli Nicolau Martin-Bassols Andries Marees Hans van Kippersluis Cornelius Rietveld Pia Arce Kevin Thom Stephanie von Hinke Jeremy Vollen Titus Galama The start of a human’s life can be characterized by two lotteries: that of your genes (nature) and the family you were born into ...

An intervention targeting mothers who curtailed their employment due to childcare responsibilities found that improving work–family reconciliation can support mothers’ return to the workforce, promote investments in existing children, and, under some conditions, strengthen interest in having more children. Findings are detailed in a new working paper from HCEO member Daniela Del Boca and coauthors.

Supporting Mothers Back to Work: Experimental Evidence on Employment, Fertility, and Child Outcomes | HCEO Author(s) Daniela Del Boca Luca Favero Chiara Pronzato Many advanced economies face persistently low fertility alongside rapid population ageing, raising concerns about economic sustainability and demographic balance. Addressing these challenges requires both sustained labor market participation amo...

New work from James J. Heckman (The Heckman Equation) and Jin Zhou explores the microdynamics of early childhood learning, with important new insights on how skills develop. Skills are produced by skill- and life cycle–stage-specific learning processes and do not appear to share a common unit scale across levels, so they must be measured and assessed carefully, the authors find.

A Study of the Microdynamics of Early-Childhood Learning | Journal of Political Economy: Vol 134, No 1 This paper investigates the weekly evolution of skills as measured by unique data from a widely emulated early-childhood home-visiting program in rural China. The design of the study avoids input endogeneity issues and lack of comparable measures of skills that plague previous studies. Skills, nomin...