Professor Pedro Carneiro

We evaluate the large-scale pilot program of an innovative and major welfare inter- vention in Colombia, which combines home visits by trained social workers to households in extreme poverty with preferential access to social programs.

In a randomized control trial, the precision of an average treatment effect estimator can be improved either by collecting data on additional individuals, or by collecting additional covariates that predict the outcome variable. We propose the use of pre-experimental data such as a census, or a household survey, to inform the choice of both the sample size and the covariates to be collected.

We assigned two cohorts of kindergarten students, totaling more than 24,000 children, to teachers within schools with a rule that is as good as random. We collected data on children at the beginning of the school year and applied 12 tests of math, language, and executive function (EF) at the end of the year.

We assigned two cohorts of kindergarten students, totaling more than 24,000 children, to teachers within schools with a rule that is as-good-as-random. We collected data on children at the beginning of the school year, and applied 12 tests of math, language and executive function (EF) at the end of the year. All teachers were filmed teaching for a full day, and the videos were coded using a wellknown classroom observation tool, the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (or CLASS). We find substantial classroom effects: A one-standard deviation increase in classroom quality results in 0.11, 0.11, and 0.07 standard deviation higher test scores in language, math, and EF, respectively. Teacher behaviors, as measured by the CLASS, are associated with higher test scores. Parents recognize better teachers, but do not change their behaviors appreciably to take account of differences in teacher quality.

This paper studies how targeted cash transfers to women affect their empowerment. We use a novel identification strategy to measure women's willingness to pay to receive cash transfers instead of their partner receiving it. We apply this among women living in poor households in urban Macedonia.

The effect of increasing school resources on educational outcomes is a central issue inthe debate on improving school quality.

We extend the standard intergenerational mobility literature by modelling individual outcomes as a function of the whole history of parental income, using data from Norway. We find that, conditional on permanent income, education is maximized when income is balanced between the early childhood and middle childhood years. In addition, there is an advantage to having income occur in late adolescence rather than in early childhood. These result are consistent with a model of parental investments in children with multiple periods of childhood, income shocks, imperfect insurance, dynamic complementarity and uncertainty about the production function and the ability of the child.

The authors examine economic determinants of name choice amongst immigrants to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, by studying the relationship between changes in the proportion of immigrants with an American first name and changes in the concentration of immigrants as well as changes in local labor market conditions, across different census years.

This paper studies the impact of permanent and transitory shocks to income on parental investments in children.

In this paper the authors use a randomised experiment to analyse the impact of a school grants program in Senegal, which decentralised a portion of the country's education budget.

This paper provides new estimates of the medium- and long-term impacts of Head Start on health and behavioral problems.

This paper evaluates the large scale pilot of an innovative and major welfare intervention in Colombia, which combines homes visits by trained social workers to households in extreme poverty with preferential access to social programs.

We study an innovative welfare program in Chile which combines a period of frequent home visits to households in extreme poverty, with guaranteed access to social services.

This paper studies the intergenerational effects of maternal education on children's cognitive achievement, behavioural problems, grade repetition, and obesity, using matched data from the female participants of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and their children.

This paper consideres the effect of the enforcement of labour regulations on informality.

We analyze new data from a randomized control trial conducted in Eritrea.

This paper provides new estimates of the medium and long-term impacts of Head Start on the health and behavioral problems of its participants.

In this paper, we analyse the consequences and determinants of cognitive and non-cognitive (social) skills at age 7, using data for Great Britain from the National Child Development Study. This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, Chicago, January 2012, as part of a session on 'The Impact of Early Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills on Later Outcomes'.