科学研究

Prof. Jin Zhou received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Western Ontario and worked as postdotoral scholar at the University of Chicago. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Department of Economics and Finance, City University of Hong Kong. Her primary fields are Applied Microeconomics, Applied Econometrics, and Development Economics. She currently focuses on research on the one of the largest early childhood interventions in the world: the China REACH project, especially on understanding the child skill development process, and designing and studying interventions aimed at accelerating the child learning process. Her works have been published at Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Econometrics, Pediatrics, and Review of Economic Dynamics etal.

This paper investigates the dynamics of early life skill formation at a granular level using unique data from a widely-emulated early childhood homevisiting program developed in Jamaica and adapted to rural China. The design of the study avoids problems of endogeneity of inputs and lack of meaningful yardsticks of skills that plague previous econometric studies of child development. Skills that are nominally classified as the same, in fact, do not share a common scale across levels. They are produced by skill-specific, lifecycle-stagespecific technologies. We formulate and estimate a new dynamic stochastic skill production model for multiple skills consistent with the evidence. We quantify the dynamics of early life learning. The model explains the “fadeout” of measures of learning. We examine the role of ability in learning. We find important differences in learning patterns between boys and girls.