The Psychological Effects of Poverty on Investments in Children’s Human Capital

Guilherme Lichand, E. Bettinger, Nina Cunha, Ricardo A. Madeira
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引用次数: 13

Abstract

Poverty focuses attention on present needs. Does that mean that poor parents respond inefficiently to future returns on investments in their children's human capital - even when they would have the financial means to invest optimally? We study this question in the context of an educational program in Brazil whose predicted child-specific returns are known to the researchers, allowing us to compute optimal decisions. Using a lab-in-the-field experiment to make some parents worry more than others about pressing financial needs, we find that those in the treatment condition offered the opportunity to invest in that program misallocate resources relative to the control group: they not only invest significantly less when the program has high returns, but also, significantly more when predicted returns are low. We show that such inefficient responses are driven by poverty-induced attention misa/Jocation, since (1) parents in the treatment condition perform better in cognitive tests that yield small but immediate returns, and (2) increasing the salience of returns before the experiment eliminates differential responses by those parents. Our results suggest that poiicy instruments to boost human capital investments among the poor, such as credit lines earmarked for education, may be insufficient to spark such investments when returns are high, and even lead to over-investment by those not expected to benefit from it.
贫困对儿童人力资本投资的心理影响
贫穷把注意力集中在目前的需要上。这是否意味着,贫穷的父母对子女人力资本投资的未来回报反应迟钝——即使他们有财力进行最佳投资?我们在巴西的一个教育项目中研究这个问题,研究人员知道该项目对特定儿童的预期回报,从而可以计算出最优决策。通过实地实验室实验,我们发现一些家长比其他家长更担心紧迫的经济需求,那些在治疗条件下有机会投资于该计划的人,相对于对照组,资源分配不当:他们不仅在计划有高回报时投资明显减少,而且在预期回报较低时,投资也明显增加。我们表明,这种低效的反应是由贫困引起的注意力缺失/职业驱动的,因为(1)在治疗条件下的父母在产生小但即时回报的认知测试中表现更好,(2)在实验消除这些父母的差异反应之前增加了回报的显著性。我们的研究结果表明,促进穷人人力资本投资的政策工具,如专门用于教育的信贷额度,可能不足以在回报高的情况下激发这种投资,甚至会导致那些预计不会从中受益的人过度投资。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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