Parental Investments and Skills Formation During Infancy and Youth: Long Term Evidence From an Early Childhood Intervention

What happens to children during the early years is recognized to be very important for their long run development. It is also increasingly clear that the skills that are relevant for economic success and more generally well-being are multidimensional, including different types of socioemotional skills. In this paper, we look at the long run impacts of an intervention targeted to premature children, known as Kangaroo Mother Care. We do so using data from a randomised control trial performed several decades ago in Bogotá, Colombia, to assess the short run impacts of such an intervention. A large fractions of the participants to that trial were examined over 20 years after the original intervention. We first show that the original intervention had a significant impact on externalizing socio-emotional skills at age 22 and a variety of adult outcomes. We then perform a mediation analysis which involves the estimation of a production function of socioemotional skills and show that the long run impact seems to be explained entirely by an increase on one type of parental investment measured when the participants were 12 months old. Our results also show a remarkable degree of persistence of different types of skills.