Are Girls' and Boys' Cognitive Test Performance in Adolescence Differently Affected by Deprivation at Earlier Ages?*

Abstract

Using data on the Millennium Children from the Young Lives Survey in Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam, we find that earlier nutritional growth and household wealth are important predictors of adolescent outcomes in math, reading, and receptive vocabulary for all children. Gender differences in the effect of wealth are significant mostly for non-poor regions. The cognitive outcomes at age 8 are more strongly associated with growth between ages 1 and 5 for girls than boys. The gender differences reverse after age 8 mostly due to strong associations between growth in preadolescence ages and cognitive outcomes at age 15 for boys. Under the conditional mean independence assumption, the estimators for growth of the children are unbiased and consistent.