The Role of Preferences, Beliefs and Decision Making for Child Development: New measures for a Structural Approach

A growing body of parenting programs establishes the importance of parent-child interactions and the literature also documents the importance of relaxing parental credit constraints during early years There is also big money going to development in poorer countries to promote early childhood development and a large fraction of governmental programs and welfare arrangements for children and families make transfers to mothers rather than fathers (e.g., child allowance). However,we have little evidence on the differences in child outcomes from programs focusing on mothers vs fathers and the mechanisms at work. In this project we suggests novel measures and collect new and comprehensive data to better understand household decision making and the mechanisms at play.