Economic Conditions in Early Childhood and the Inter-Generational Transmission of Poverty

The economic conditions which children experience during their early years can have permanent impact on cognitive and non-cognitive traits that shape outcomes later in life. This might be key to explaining the persistence of poverty across generations. The aim of this project is to establish whether this chain can be broken. The research team aims to achieve this via a large-scale trial designed to evaluate an innovative anti-poverty programme targeting women in the poorest areas of Bangladesh. The team will build on previous work demonstrating that this programme has transformed the economic lives of beneficiaries from 2007-2014, in order to determine whether these benefits have been carried over to the next generation. The findings will shed light on the dynamics of poverty and inform cost-benefit analyses of anti-poverty programmes.

Principal Investigator: Professor Oriana Bandiera, London School of Economics and Political Science