Early Nutrition and Cognition in Peru

Ingo Outes-Leon, Catherine Porter and Alan Sanchez

No 4743, Research Department Publications from Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department

Abstract: This paper examines the causal link between early childhood nutrition and cognition, applying instrumental variables to sibling-differences for a sample of pre-school aged Peruvian children. Child-specific shocks in the form of food price changes and household shocks during the critical developmental period of a child are used as instruments. The analysis shows significant and positive returns to early childhood nutritional investments. An increase in the Height-for-Age z-score of one standard deviation—keeping other factors constant—translates into increases in the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) score of 17-21 percent of a standard deviation. The period of analysis includes the recent global food price crisis that also affected Peru between 2006 and 2008. This therefore is also a quantification of the nutritional and subsequent cognitive costs of food prices on the sample, which could be magnified in later years.

JEL-codes: I12 I20 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.iadb.org/research/pub_hits.cfm?pub_id=36377067 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.iadb.org/research/pub_hits.cfm?pub_id=36377067 [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.iadb.org/research/pub_hits.cfm?pub_id=36377067)

Related works:
Working Paper: Early Nutrition and Cognition in Peru (2011)
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:idb:wpaper:4743

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Research Department Publications from Inter-American Development Bank, Research Department Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Felipe Herrera Library ().