Beliefs, Attention, and Investments in Early Childhood

Flavio Cunha, Snejana Nihtianova, Jessica Rood and Anja-Lize van der Merwe

No 35150, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We develop a model of parental investment in early childhood in which bandwidth-constrained parents hold distorted beliefs about the returns to responsive interaction. When capacity falls short of aspiration, motivated reasoning provides relief: the parent distorts her working belief downward, rationalizing low engagement. Distorted beliefs suppress responsive parenting, which generates no calibration evidence, which, in turn, confirms the distortion. The model identifies four channels through which interventions escape this self-sealing trap. A randomized controlled trial confirms the model's predictions on parental beliefs, measures of responsive parenting, behavioral engagement, and absence of impact on materials or placebo outcomes.

JEL-codes: C93 D83 D91 I20 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-04
Note: CH
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35150.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
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:35150

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w35150
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

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 ().