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 language | English (US) |
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Article number | 104686 |
Journal | Journal of Public Economics |
Volume | 212 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 2022 |
Keywords
- Child development
- Female Labor Market Participation
- Keywords: Childcare
- Latin America
- Quality
- RCT
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Finance
- Economics and Econometrics