Persistent Poverty and Children’s Cognitive Development: Evidence from the UK Millennium Cohort Study

We use data from the four sweeps of the UK Millennium Cohort Study of children born at the turn of the century to document the impact that poverty, and in particular persistent poverty, has on their cognitive development in thier early years. We show that children born into poverty in their early years have significantly lower test scores at age 3, age 5 and age 7, and that continually living in poverty in their early years has a culmulative negative imapct on their cognitive development