This thesis focusses on three research questions related to the process of childhood development.

The first addresses the relative importance of home and school characteristics for the emergence of cognitive achievement gaps between urban and rural children in Peru. The empirical strategy is based on estimating a production function for cognitive skill combining longitudinal data on children’s cognitive achievement and household characteristics with the results of a recent school survey, both provided by the Young Lives study.

The second research question explores the effect that early interventions focussed on improving parent-child interactions have on parental time allocation decisions.

The third research question explores the mechanisms through which parental time use responds to these interventions and relates these responses to children’s developmental outcomes. The empirical strategy for these research questions relies on collecting and comparing time-use and parenting information from the control and treatment caregivers selected for the RCT used to evaluate the Cuna Mas programme in Peru.