Identifying climate shocks in Young Lives communities: estimating weather conditions using a global gridded time series

This technical note describes the process of selecting, preparing and matching external climate data to Young Lives respondents’ locations to derive ex-post estimates of climate conditions at a community level in regions which traditionally have poor climate data collection capacity. The note also details how to use these matched data, specifically precipitation records, to assess experiences of anomalous conditions relative to historical mean conditions for each community. Finally, it briefly details the structure and content of the publicly archived dataset, and how this dataset may be used for further research

Psychosocial Competencies and Risky Behaviours in Peru

The authors use a unique longitudinal dataset from Peru to investigate the relationship between psychosocial competencies related to the concepts of self-esteem, self-efficacy and aspirations, and a number of risky behaviours at a crucial period of transition between adolescence and early adulthood. First, the researchers document a high prevalence of risky behaviours, with one in two individuals engaging in at least one risky activity by the age of 19, and a dramatic increase between the ages of 15 and 19. Second, the document finds a pronounced pro-male bias and some differences according to area of residence, particularly in the consumption of alcohol, which is more prevalent in urban areas. Third, the report finds a negative correlation (robust to a number of specifications) between early self-esteem and later risky behaviours. Further, aspiring to higher education at the age of 15 is found to be correlated with a lower probability of drinking and of engaging in criminal behaviours at the age of 19. Similarly, such aspirations protect girls from risky sexual behaviours

Human Capital Development:New Evidence on the Production of Socio-emotional Skills

We estimate a dynamic model of multidimensional human capital development from childhood through adolescence and into early adulthood for a Peruvian cohort born in 1994. We exploit multiple measures of cognitive and socio-emotional skills and a latent factor structure to estimate flexible skills production functions between the ages of 8 and 22. We focus particularly on socio-emotional skill development, and provide the first estimates of such skill production over such a long period in a developing country context. In the last period, when individuals reach adulthood at age 22, we show that socio-emotional skills can be separated into two distinct domains - social skills and task effectiveness skills- which develop differently especially with regard to time use and cross-productivity with cognition. We find that individuals with higher task effectiveness are less likely to have engaged in risky behaviours such as smoking, taking drugs, and engaging with gangs

Social Protection and Foundational Cognitive Skills During Adolescence: Evidence from a Large Public Works Programme

Many low- and middle-income countries have introduced Public Works Programmes (PWPs) to fight poverty. PWPs provide temporary cash-for-work opportunities to boost poor households’ incomes and to provide better infrastructure to local communities. While PWPs do not target children directly, the increased demand for adult labour may affect children’s development through increasing households’ incomes and changing household members’ time uses. This paper expands on a multidimensional literature showing the relationship between early life circumstances and learning outcomes and provides the first evidence that children from families who benefit from PWPs show increased foundational cognitive skills (FCS). We focus on four child FCS: inhibitory control, working memory, long-term memory, and implicit learning. Our results, based on unique tablet-based data collected as part of a 20-year longitudinal survey, show positive associations of family participation in the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP) in Ethiopia during childhood on long-term memory and implicit learning, with weaker evidence for working memory. These associations appear to be strongest for children whose households were still PSNP participants in the year of data collection. We find suggestive evidence that, the association with implicit learning may be operating through children’s time reallocation away from unpaid labour responsibilities, while the association with long-term memory may be due to the programme’s success in remediating nutritional deficits caused by early life rainfall shocks. Our results suggest that policy interventions such as PWPs may be able to mitigate the effects of early poverty on cognitive skills formation and thereby improve children’s potential future outcomes

How Early Nutrition and Foundational Cognitive Skills Interconnect? Evidence from Two Developing Countries

We use unique data collected in Ethiopia and Peru as part of the Young Lives Study to investigate the relationship between early undernutrition and four foundational cognitive skills, the first two of which measure executive functioning: working memory, inhibitory control, long-term memory, and implicit learning. We exploit the rich longitudinal data available to control for potential confounders at the household level and for time-invariant community characteristics. We also exploit the availability of data for paired-siblings to obtain household fixed-effects estimates. Overall, we find robust evidence that stunting is negatively related with the development of executive functions, predicting reductions in working memory and inhibitory control by 12.6% and 5.8% of a standard deviation. Our results shed light on the mechanisms that explain the relationship between early nutrition and school achievement tests suggesting that good nutrition is an important determinant of children’s learning capacities

“United We Stand Divided We Fall” : Maternal Social Participation and Children’s Nutritional Status in Peru

In previous literature, social capital has been hypothesized as a substitute for other forms of capital, such as physical and human capital. This paper contributes to this literature, studying the association between mothers’ access to social capital via participation in community organizations and their children’s nutritional status at 1 and 5 years. Using the Peruvian sample of the Young Lives project, this study suggests that, where human capital is scarce, social capital might have important implications for child development. Maternal social capital is positively associated with height at 1 year old for those children whose mothers have no formal education. No significant association is found at 5 years of age

Late-Childhood Foundational Cognitive Skills Predict Educational Outcomes Through Adolescence and Into Young Adulthood: Evidence from Ethiopia and Peru

We estimate the associations between a set of foundational cognitive skills (inhibitory control, working memory, long-term memory, and implicit learning) measured at age 12 and educational outcomes measured at ages 15 and 19-20 in Ethiopia and Peru (the Young Lives study). The estimates adjust for a rich set of lagged controls and include measurements of children’s general abilities. For a subset of the outcomes, we exploit within-household variation. Working memory and long-term memory are consistently and positively associated with subsequent domain-specific cognitive achievement tests in both countries, university enrolment in Peru (working memory) and lower secondary-school completion in Ethiopia (long-term memory). Inhibitory control predicts subsequent math-test scores in both countries, and grade attainment in Ethiopia. These results provide additional evidence to justify the importance of promoting investments in cognitive skills throughout childhood and adolescence, and these results potentially elucidate how investments in children impact their educational achievements

Estratificación de los retornos a la educación superior en el Perú: el rol de la calidad de la educación y las opciones de carrera

Este documento de política analiza la situación de América Latina y el Caribe con respecto a sus niveles de crecimientos en la tasa de asistencia a educación superior. En el caso del Perú, la tasa bruta de asistencia en este nivel aumentó entre el 2001 y el 2019 (para jóvenes de 17 a 21 años). En este contexto de mayor acceso, la calidad de la educación superior se ha convertido en una preocupación central

The mental cost of job loss: assessing the impact on young adults in Vietnam

We exploit the extensive job loss associated with the devastating fourth wave of COVID-19 in Vietnam to examine the impact of unemployment on young people's experiences of anxiety and depression. Using data from a longitudinal study with individual and survey-wave fixed effects, we show that job loss significantly increases levels of anxiety, but not depression. Specifically, job loss leads to a 5.9 percentage point increase in the probability of experiencing symptoms consistent with either mild or severe anxiety, almost doubling the pre-wave baseline. This effect is driven by individuals in the top earnings tercile who no longer live in their natal household - suggesting that the impact of job loss on anxiety is most acute among young people who are under pressure as the primary earners in their household. Perceived financial strain and food insecurity explain up to 22% of the estimated increase in anxiety. Our results support expanding mental health programmes to explicitly target young adults who have lost their job

Comprendiendo el embarazo, la convivencia y el matrimonio en la adolescencia: el caso del Perú

En las encuestas de Niños del Milenio y estadísticas nacionales, 1 de cada 5 mujeres a los 19 años tenía al menos un hijo. Se propone reforzar políticas públicas para postergar el embarazo adolescente: concluir la secundaria, mejorar la educación sexual y promover la autoconfianza