Research

We evaluate a parent-directed empathy development program for middle school students in China using a randomized trial with 2,246 students. The four-month mobile app intervention produced short-run gains in empathy and reduced bullying but no immediate academic effects. Over the longer term, treatment students were 3.2 percentage points more likely to enter elite high schools and 2.5 percentage points less likely to miss the entrance exam. We trace these gains to improved self-beliefs and a restructuring of classroom friendship networks that reduced academic homophily, revealing a social channel of cross-productivity: non-cognitive investments can reshape peer relationships to improve academic outcomes.

This paper evaluates the Jumpstart Program (JSP), a parenting intervention implemented by a school district in the Houston area to enhance school readiness among economically disadvantaged three-year-old children. Unlike many early childhood programs typically tested in controlled research settings, JSP leverages existing school district resources for scalability and practical application. We conducted a three-year randomized controlled trial to measure the program’s impact on child cognitive outcomes, parental engagement, and mechanisms of change. The results indicate improvements in children’s performance on curriculum-aligned assessments and modest gains in general cognitive readiness as measured by the Bracken School Readiness Assessment. Furthermore, treatment group parents demonstrated increased reading frequency with their children, underscoring enhanced parental involvement as a crucial mechanism behind the program’s success. We employed a structural model to analyze both the direct effects of JSP and its indirect effects through changes in the marginal productivity of investments or preferences via habit formation. Our analysis concludes that 75% of the program’s impact is attributed to direct effects, while 25% is mediated through changes in habit formation in parental investments. Our research underscores the potential of scalable, real-world interventions to bridge socio-economic gaps in early childhood development and inform the design of effective educational policies.

According to UNESCO, one-third of the world’s youths are victims of bullying, which deteriorates academic performance and mental health, and increases suicide ideation and the risk of committing suicide. This paper analyzes a four-month parent-directed intervention designed to foster empathy in middle schoolers in China. Our implementation and evaluation study enrolled 2,246 seventh and eighth graders and their parents, whom we assigned, at the classroom level, to the control or intervention condition randomly. We measured, before and after the intervention, parental investments, children’s empathy, and self-reported bullying perpetration and victimization incidents. Our analyses show that the intervention increased investments and empathy and reduced bullying incidents. In addition, we measured costs and found that it costs $12.50 for our intervention to reduce one bullying incident. Our study offers a scalable and low-cost strategy that can inform public policy on bullying prevention in other similar settings.