Essays on maternal investment and child human capital accumulation

This dissertation explores the role of early maternal investments on children's human capital accumulation through three co-authored essays.;The first essay studies the impact of maternal endowments-considered as cognitive, socioemotional and physical fitness- on infant health at birth, an important determinant of human capital accumulation later in life. It calculates the net impact of endowments on infant health as well as recovers the effect through two choices: education and smoking in pregnancy. Results show the importance of skills on infant health and recover the treatment effects for education and smoking in pregnancy. They also highlight that the impact of prenatal investments is heterogeneous across the distribution of endowments.;The second essay assesses the long lasting impact of shocks early in life and explores some of the possible channels causing the long term effects. To do so, it uses a typhoon which happened in the Philippines in 1984 as a natural experiment. The work also aims at understanding which periods are most sensitive to such shocks. It finds that children who were most affected by the typhoon were the ones who were in the first trimester of pregnancy or just conceived when the typhoon arrived, who measure between 0.3 and 0.5 SD shorter than the non affected children. It also finds some suggestive evidence of mothers buffering the shock for the kids who were affected by the typhoon in early life, as mothers seem to respond by continuing breastfeeding longer and reducing their own amount of food to give it to the kids.;The third essay moves from pregnancy to early childhood. It analyzes the long term labor market returns to a parenting intervention in Jamaica. In this intervention, stunted children were randomized into either a cognitive stimulation program or a control. In the cognitive stimulation program, community aid workers trained in early childhood education visited children 9-24 months and their mothers one hour per week for a total of two years. The emphasis of the program was on improving mother-child interaction. Results twenty years later show that the cognitive stimulation program increased wages up to 50%. They also show that it had consistent differences in both cognitive and social skills. Just as importantly, the program allowed stunted children to catch-up with a sample of non stunted kids who was matched by sex and residence and that was much less disadvantaged at birth.;All three essays highlight the importance of maternal resources and investments on child later achievement. Maternal endowments can be seen as the cumulative investment from the previous generation. In this light, the first essay stresses the intergenerational transmission of inequality and disadvantage. However, the second and third essays show that even temporary shocks (negative in the second essay, positive in the third one) can have long lasting effects. In particular, the third essay seems to indicate that remediation to at least some type of early disadvantage may be possible through increasing maternal investments.