Sean Sylvia is an Assistant Professor of health economics at UNC. His primary research interest is in the delivery of healthcare in China and other middle-income countries. Working with multidisciplinary teams of collaborators, he conducts large-scale population-based surveys and randomized trials to develop and test new approaches to provide healthcare to the poor and marginalized. His recent work focuses on the use of information technology to expand access to quality healthcare.
Download my CV here.
PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics (Development Economics), 2014
University of Maryland, College Park
MS in Agricultural and Resource Economics, 2012
University of Maryland, College Park
BS in Economics (Chinese minor), 2006
University of Alabama
We present evidence from a randomized experiment on the impacts of a six-month early childhood home-visiting program on child outcomes at school entry. Two and a half years after completion of the program, we find persistent intervention effects on child working memory - a key skill of executive functioning which plays a central role in children’s development of cognitive and socio-emotional skills. We also find that the program had persistent effects on both parental time investments and preschool enrollment, with children in the treatment group enrolling earlier and in better quality preschools. Our finding of improved parental preschool selection in treatment villages points to an important intervention-induced persistent shift in parental investment behavior which might lead to long-term benefits over the life-cycle.
Search or filter publications.
If no pdf file is posted, please email me for the paper.