Essays on inequality in human capital development

Abstract

This thesis is comprised of three self-contained essays, each of which attempts to understand the early origins of inequality in “human capital”. Motivated by the unequal rise in rates of childhood obesity over the past four decades, the first focusses on the relationship between socioeconomic status and the incidence of overweight and obesity across childhood in a cohort of children born in the UK between 2000 and 2002. It analyses the relationship between conditions as early as 9 months of age and the likelihood a child is overweight or obese at age 14, and then documents how the contemporaneous relationship between parental income and weight and children’s weight changes over time. The second chapter then focusses on health more generally among the same cohort, and estimates the developmental path of health over childhood. It also asks how health affects the accumulation of cognitive and socio-emotional skills over the same period. Given evidence of the link between health and socioeconomic status, doing so adds to the evidence on the early origins of disparities in health and how they affect - or are affected by - skills. Because characteristics like health and cognitive and socio-emotional skill cannot be measured perfectly, this chapter uses recent methodological advances for estimating non-linear dynamic factor models to estimate a model of child development that accounts for mismeasurement of children’s human capital and the early environment. Lastly, the third essay analyses the development of socio-emotional skills in cohort of Peruvian children born in 1994. It also analyses how socio-emotional skills develop alongside cognition and, in early adulthood at age 22, how they affect the likelihood of engagement in risky behaviours. Over the past two decades, socio-emotional skills have been established as important determinants of social and economic outcomes. This chapter uses the same methodology as in Chapter 2 to understand their development, how they are affected by early circumstances and whether they influence young adults’ behaviour.