Public childcare benefits children and mothers: Evidence from a nationwide experiment in a developing country

Andrés Hojman, Florencia Lopez Boo

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This paper evaluates a public childcare program for children ages 0–4 in poor urban areas in Nicaragua. Our identification strategy exploits the program's neighborhood-level randomization as exogenous variation to tackle imperfect compliance with the original treatment assignments. We find a positive impact of 0.38 standard deviations on socio-emotional skills and a 12-percentage-point increase on mothers’ work, which makes the program highly cost-effective. We do not find evidence of substantial heterogeneity of impacts across observed or unobserved household characteristics, and we present suggestive evidence of the importance of center quality for generating positive impacts.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number104686
JournalJournal of Public Economics
Volume212
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 2022

Keywords

  • Child development
  • Female Labor Market Participation
  • Keywords: Childcare
  • Latin America
  • Quality
  • RCT

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Finance
  • Economics and Econometrics

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