Socioeconomic Gradients in Child Development: Evidence from a Chilean Longitudinal Study 2010 – 2017

Empirical evidence shows that lack of resources during infancy and the process of accumulating disadvantages throughout childhood have important consequences in cognitive and socio-emotional development. This paper examines socioeconomic gradients across cognitive and socio-emotional measures. Using longitudinal data from a 7 year - 3 wave panel data, we study the patterns of socioeconomic status and child development in Chile and estimate how much of the wealth gap can be explained by different mediators like maternal educational and skills, child attendance to preschool and school, possession of books, or violence indicators at home. We show strong associations between household wealth and child development, and as the child grows, the gap between the most extreme quintiles of the distribution, both in cognitive and socio-emotional skills remains, but decreases in magnitude. Taking advantage of the longitudinal nature of the data, we calculate a permanent skill for each child and each skill dimension in this 7-year period. The analysis for the permanent component shows that wealth gaps are important to determine cognitive ability but not socioemotional skills. While mediators account for some of the associations, there is still a large socioeconomic gap that persists in cognitive skills among children. By understanding the dynamism of social and cognitive vulnerability experienced during childhood and employing longitudinal data and methods, this study contributes to and extends the existing literature on socioeconomic gaps and child development in the context of Latin American.