Esteban Puentes

Early life height and weight production functions with endogenous energy and protein inputs

Highlights • We estimate height and weight production functions for infants.• We focus on the role of energy and protein intake.• We use IV to control for endogeneity and estimate a number of models.• The results indicate that protein play an important role in height and weight change.

The determinants of labour force participation and employment in Chile

Chiles labour force participation is low in comparison with Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Latin American countries on average, especially among females and youths. This article estimates the main determinants of labour supply and employment for prime-age individuals and youths using data from the National Household Survey (CASEN) for 1990, 1996 and 2003. Educational attainment is found to be a powerful predictor of labour supply and employability for both males and females. The number of young children in the household is a strong deterrent to female participation, both for prime-age and young women. Changes in labour supply and employment during 1990 and 2003 are decomposed using the probit estimations. The results suggest that structural changes in the economy were the main determinants of changes in participation among prime-age individuals, but the converse is true for changes in employment, which depended predominantly on shifts in individual characteristics.

The Union Effect on Wages in Chile: A Two‐Stage Approach Using Panel Data

We estimate the wage premium in Chile for the period 2004-2009 following a two-stage procedure that corrects the endogeneity of the union decision process. We find that there is true state dependence in the union decision. The wage premium after controlling for endogeneity is close to 20%. At the same time we find evidence that unions tend to increase more the wages of the low end of the wage distribution. Economic sectors are important in the wage equation but seem less relevant in explaining union membership.The most relevant factor that explain union membership is firm size.

Micro-Entrepreneurship Debt Level and Access to Credit: Short Term Impacts of a Financial Literacy Program

Using a randomized control trial, we evaluated the effect of a financial literacy program on the level of debt and on formal access to credit in Chile. We use a sample of beneficiaries of a publicly run micro-entrepreneurship program. We evaluated the program using administrative data with information on the debt level, interest rates, and new loans provided by the formal sector. The program tends to decreased debt level in the short run while increasing the probability of having formal debt. The program had effects in parts of the country where the take-up was higher and the implementation was smoother.À l’aide d’un essai contrôlé aléatoire, nous avons évalué l’effet d’un programme d’éducation financière sur le niveau de la dette et sur l’accès formel au crédit au Chili. Nous avons utilisé un échantillon de bénéficiaires d’un programme de micro-entreprenariat public. De plus, nous avons évalué le programme en utilisant des données administratives, comprenant des informations sur le montant de la dette, les taux d’intérêt et les nouveaux prêts accordés par le secteur formel. Le programme a tendance à faire diminuer le niveau de la dette à court terme, tout en augmentant la probabilité d’avoir une dette formelle. Il a eu des effets dans les parties du pays où son adoption était plus élevée et la mise en œuvre était plus facile.

You Are What Your Parents Think: Height and Local Reference Points

Recent estimates are that about 170 million children under i¬ ve years of age are stunted, with signii¬ cant long-run negative consequences on their schooling, cognitive skills, health and economic productivity. Understanding what determines such growth retardation,therefore, is very important. We build a structural model for nutritional choices and height growth with reference–dependent preferences. Parents care about the relative height of their child compared to some reference population. In our empirical model, reference height is an equilibrium object determined by the parental nutritional choices for earlier cohorts in the same village. Taking advantage of a protein-supplementation experiment in Guatemala, we use exogenous variations in differential height growth paths between treated and control villages to estimate the model. We conduct a number of counterfactual policy simulations. First, we i¬ nd that reference point changes account for up to 60% of the 1.7 cm in height difference between experimental and control villages at 24 months of age. Second,focusing on one-period effects, to obtain the same mean effects as an 1 cm increase in reference points would require a protein-price discount of 37 percent or an income increase of 60 percent. Third, endogenous reference points changes lead to signii¬ cant policy spillovers: under poor-targeted subsidy policies, richer households over time gain up to 50 percent of the height gains of poorer households; under an universal subsidy policy, poorer households’ height gains increase from an initially low level by up to 4.8 times across periods as richer households,who also receive subsidies, help push up height reference points.

Wealth disparities for early childhood anthropometrics and Skills: evidence from chilean longitudinal data

We study wealth disparities in the formation of anthropometrics, cognitive skills and socio-emotional skills. We use a sample of preschool and early school children in Chile. We extend the previous literature by using longitudinal data, which allow us to study the dynamics of child growth and skills formation. Also, we include information on mothers and fathers schooling attainment and mothers cognitive ability. We find that there are no significant anthropometric differences favoring the better-off at birth (and indeed length differences at birth to the disadvantage of the better-off), but during the first 30 months of life wealth disparities in height-for-age z scores (HAZ) favoring the better-off emerge. Moreover, we find wealth disparities in cognitive skills favoring the better-off emerge early in life and continue after children turn 6 years of age. We find no concurrent wealth disparities for and socio-emotional skills. Thus, even though the wealth disparities in birth outcomes if anything favor the poor, significant disparities favoring the rich emerge in the early post-natal period. Mothers education and cognitive ability also are significantly associated with disparities in skill formation.

Inequality of Opportunities at Early Ages: Evidence from Chile

ABSTRACT This paper examines inequality of opportunity for Chilean children starting from an early age. It uses a psychometric test designed to assess children’s receptive vocabulary (PPVT), height, and weight as opportunity measures. We consider traditional circumstances such as parental income and educational level, but improve on the previous literature including mother’s cognitive skills in our assessment. Our results indicate that Chilean children do not exhibit significant differences in height or weight either as newborns or at two to four years old. Nevertheless, there is evidence of inequality of opportunities for vocabulary skills. Maternal cognitive ability is the greatest contributor. Finally, the evidence also suggests that inequality of opportunity on vocabulary skills increases with age.