Seminar: Child Socio-emotional Skills: The role of parental inputs

Informed by the psychological literature and our empirical evidence we provide new insights on the technology of socio-emotional skill formation in middle childhood. We confi rm existing evidence that increasing parental inputs that enrich the child home environment and reduce stress has larger returns for children with higher socio-emotional skills in early childhood (complementarity), but only for level of inputs that are large. For low level of inputs, i.e. implying a stressful home environment, an increase has a higher return for children with lower socio-emotional skills in early childhood (substitutability), meaning that well targeted policies can reduce middle childhood socio-emotional gaps.