The department is a lively community that is recognised internationally as one of the top centres for research and teaching in development studies.

Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
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.