Intergenerational Effects of Early-Life Advantage: Lessons from a Primate Study

Amanda M. Dettmer, James Heckman, Juan Pantano, Victor Ronda and Stephen J. Suomi

No 27737, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper uses three decades of studies with Rhesus monkeys to investigate the intergenerational effects of early life advantage. Monkeys and their offspring were both randomly assigned to be reared together or apart from their mothers. We document significant intergenerational effects of maternal presence. We also estimate, for the first time, the intergenerational complementarity of early life advantage, where the intergenerational effects of maternal rearing are only present for offspring that were mother-reared. This finding suggests that parenting is the primary mechanism driving the intergenerational effects. Our paper demonstrates how studies of primates can inform human development.

JEL-codes: I12 Y80 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv and nep-neu
Note: CH EH
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27737.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Intergenerational Effects of Early-Life Advantage: Lessons from a Primate Study (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27737

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27737

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().