Giuseppe Sorrenti

Impact of Early Interventions

Giuseppe Sorrenti currently studies whether early interventions potentially affect life trajectories of individuals. To do so, he takes advantage of a randomized intervention targeting second grade primary school (age 8) students in Zurich. The intervention took place in 2005 and followed individuals over a 12-year period. The intervention provided socio-emotional training to children. The standardized training was performed by teachers, took place during school, and lasted two hours per week for a total of 60-80 hours per year. The study looked for possible treatment effects of the intervention on education outcomes, namely enrollment in the academic school track gymnasium, enrollment in university, and earnings. The analysis reveals that an increase in socio-emotional skills, the main target of the intervention, is the main driver of the sizeable treatment effects.

The aim of Mr. Sorrenti’s research is to try to assess how different interventions and policies shape individuals’ life opportunities. His research combines reduced-form and structural econometrics to study research questions related to child development, parenting styles and, more general, to better understand the human capital accumulation process with an emphasis on children from less-advantaged backgrounds.

During his stay at CESifo, Mr. Sorrenti hopes to take advantage of the community of resident scholars performing research in fields like child development, economics of education, and policy evaluation to advance his own research and discuss possible future collaborations. In particular, he would like to have the opportunity to further discuss projects related with early interventions, e.g. mentoring programs and parenting styles, as these topics have been recently studied by several scholars at CESifo.

Giuseppe Sorrenti is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Amsterdam School of Economics (University of Amsterdam). He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Turin and Collegio Carlo Alberto in 2016. Prior to moving to Amsterdam in 2020, he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich. He is a research fellow at the Tinbergen Institute and at CHILD-Collegio Carlo Alberto.