The Lasting Impact of Early Life Inequalities

This dissertation analyzes how early inequalities in health and education affect later educational, health, and social and emotional outcomes. I place particular emphasis on how the unique economic circumstances of the developing world interact with the dynamic and multidimensional nature of child development. In Chapter 1, I build a theory of human capital formation that links early health differences to observed schooling gaps across countries. My main finding is that early health inequalities are amplified into large schooling gaps within and across countries. In Chapter 2, I use a unique Indian data set to link private school attendance to measures of self-efficacy and self-esteem and find that private school may play at least as significant a role in early psychosocial as in cognitive development. Finally, in Chapter 3, I construct a novel measure of seasonal food scarcity and find that prenatal exposure to scarcity has a lasting impact on childhood health in Ethiopia. Overall, my findings highlight the importance of understanding the dynamic and multidimensional nature of child development for effective targeting of policy interventions in the developing world