CESR Seminar and Brown Bag Series
Monday, May 6 | Gabriella Conti – UCL
Seminar | Workforce Quality in Early Years Interventions: Evidence from a Large-Scale Home Visiting Program (with Sarah Cattan and Christine Farquharson)
Gabriella Conti – UCL
Monday, May 6, 2024
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
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Abstract: Targeted early years programmes can have significant benefits for children’s development; however, there are many examples of early interventions that have failed to live up to their promise, particularly when delivered at scale. Understanding the inputs into a successful early years programme is therefore essential to reform existing interventions and guide investment into the most promising programmes. In this paper, we consider the role of a crucial input: workforce effectiveness. We evaluate the degree of heterogeneity in workforce effectiveness in the context of the highly trained workforce employed by a successful, at-scale home visiting programme in England. Using the quasi-random assignment of workers to families for identification, we estimate each worker’s value-added in promoting children’s physical, cognitive and socio-emotional development. We find evidence of substantial heterogeneity in workforce effectiveness; for example, a one-standard deviation increase in effectiveness leads to a 0.31SD increase in cognitive performance at age 2, and a 0.23SD increase in socio-emotional development. However, despite having access to unusually detailed data on worker characteristics and on process quality, we are only able to explain a small fraction of the variation in worker effectiveness. Overall, our results show that there is substantial heterogeneity in effectiveness even among highly skilled workers, but we are only starting to understand its determinants.
Bio: Gabriella Conti is a Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics and in the Social Research Institute at University College London; and Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and at IZA Bonn. She is also Associate Editor at the Journal of Health Economics and at Health Economics, Trustee at the Foundation Years Information and Research, and scientific adviser of the Lancet Commission for Gender-Based Violence and Maltreatment of Young People.
Her research areas of interest are health economics, the economics of human development, and biology and economics.
CESR Seminar & Brown Bag Series 2024
The CESR Seminar & Brown Bag Series will resume Monday, August 26, 2024 and conclude Monday, December 16, 2024.
Mondays
12pm – 1pm
VPD 203 and Zoom
Add series to your calendar, check for updated speaker list in August
Past Events
For more information on the seminar presentations, or if you would like to attend the presentation, or to meet with any of the speakers, please contact Italo Lopez Garcia or Evan Sandlin.
For more information on the brown bag presentations, or if you would like to attend the presentation or be added to our list for announcements, please contact Michele Warnock.