This paper studies if high-quality primary education can serve as an equalizer for children exposed to diverse rearing practices at home in Colombia. Building on well-established literatures demonstrating that parenting interventions and teacher professional development programs can effectively support children's learning, we randomly assign children to a sequence of treatment combinations: only a parenting intervention, only a teacher intervention, both interventions, or no intervention. The two treatments, both individually and together, have a similar effect on children's standardized math scores, with an impact of 0.20 standard deviations  compared to receiving no interventions. We find no complementarities between the two interventions, suggesting that effective schools can compensate for inequalities in family rearing practices.

 

About the speaker

Alessandro Toppeta is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) at Stockholm University.

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He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from University College London (UCL) in 2023. His research focuses on inequality and poverty, particularly through the lens of human capital.

Alessandro is also a Research Associate at the Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice (CeMMAP) and a Research Affiliate at the Stone Centre at UCL.

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