Giovanni Scotti Bentivoglio

Prenatal exposure to air pollution has been shown to have adverse effects on health and educational achievement. The size of these effects may depend on parental involvement in the child’s development. Using data from Germany, we investigate such interaction effects on entry into the academic secondary-school track (Gymnasium) and on school grades. To deal with potential endogeneity of pollution exposure, we leverage variations in the height of the planetary boundary layer, an exogenous atmospheric variable strongly predicting pollution levels. We find that higher in-utero pollution exposure decreases the likelihood of entering the academic track, especially among low-SES children. Importantly, high maternal involvement in engaging activities effectively mitigates the adverse effects of pollution, while a high frequency of passive, screen-based activities with the child does not moderate pollution effects.

This paper investigates the interplay between genetics and parenting in the development of socioemotional skills, by estimating and modeling the joint evolution of skills and parental investments across childhood and adolescence. Results show that genetic predispositions have a sizeable and persistent impact on the evolution of socioemotional skills, both directly and through their effects on parental investments. Parents react to socioemotional difficulties with a harsher discipline and lower time spent with the child, which in turn increases the child's socioemotional problems, thus widening initial differences in skills. Overall, this study documents the importance of incorporating genetics in models of skill formation and shows that ignoring genes results in the misestimation of the returns to skills and investments.