Inequalities in adolescent learning: Does the timing and persistence of food insecurity at home matter?

Elisabetta Aurino, Jasmine Fledderjohann (j.fledderjohann@lancaster.ac.uk) and Sukumar Vellakkal
Additional contact information
Jasmine Fledderjohann: Lancaster University, UK
Sukumar Vellakkal: BITS Pilano, India

No 2018: 09, Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Venice "Ca' Foscari"

Abstract: We investigated inequalities in learning achievements at 12 years by household food insecurity trajectories at ages 5, 8 and 12 years in a longitudinal sample of 1,911 Indian children. Estimates included extensive child and household controls, and lagged cognitive scores to address unobserved individual heterogeneity in ability and early investments. Overall, household food insecurity at any age predicted lower vocabulary, reading, maths and English scores in early adolescence. Adolescents from households that transitioned out from food insecurity at age 5 to later food security, and adolescents from chronically food insecure households had the lowest scores across all outcomes. There was heterogeneity in the relationship between temporal occurrence of food insecurity and cognitive skills, based on developmental and curriculum-specific timing of skill formation. Results were robust to additional explanations of the "household food insecurity gap", i.e. education and health investments, parental and child education aspirations, and child psychosocial skills.

Keywords: Cognitive skills; Learning; Adolescent; Food insecurity; India; Education inequality; Human capital; Longitudinal; Education; Lifecourse (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H52 I24 I29 I39 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2018
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-dev, nep-edu and nep-neu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.unive.it/web/fileadmin/user_upload/dip ... _vellakkal_09_18.pdf First version, anno (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Inequalities in adolescent learning: Does the timing and persistence of food insecurity at home matter? (2019)
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:ven:wpaper:2018:09

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Venice "Ca' Foscari" Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sassano Sonia (wp.dse@unive.it).