【题  目】Interactions as Investments: The Microdynamics and Measurement of Early Childhood Learning

【时  间】2021年11月10日（星期三），10:00-11:30

【地  点】Zoom Meeting, ID: 944 0888 7512；Passcode: 065454

【主讲人】周瑾 博士（芝加哥大学经济系、人类发展经济学中心研究员）

【主持人】徐慧 副教授（北京师范大学经济与工商管理学院）

摘要：Child psychologists study the actions of parents, caregivers, and children that promote child development. Home visiting programs interact with caregivers to foster caregiver-child attachment and child skills. This paper uses novel experimental data from a widely-emulated home visiting program implemented in China with high-frequency measurements to investigate the effectiveness of different types of interactions in promoting child development. Quality interactions between home visitors and caregivers enhance the development of child skills. We propose and implement tests for dynamic complementarity that do not rely on arbitrary measures of skill. We formulate and estimate a dynamic model of learning for multiple skills and quantify the sources of learning in the early lifecycle. Using our model, we test and reject the widely-held assumption of age invariance for measures of language and cognitive skills.

报告人简介： Jin Zhou currently is a research associate at Department of Economics and Center for the Economics of Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her current research mainly focuses on understanding individuals’ skill formation and its impact on labor market outcomes. In general, it involves three big questions: (a) how to measure skills; (b) what are the mechanisms through which we learn and develop skills; (c) the impacts of skills on individuals’ lifecycle outcomes. She jointly leads the research of China REACH project, which aims to improve the social mobility of rural children in China.