Analyzing Social Experiments as Implemented: A Reexamination of the Evidence from the Highscope Perry Preschool Program

Heckman, James J.; Moon, Seong Hyeok; Pinto, Rodrigo; Savelyev, Peter A.; Yavitz, Adam

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1651720

Cited by 36 publications

(60 citation statements)

References 17 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The distribution consists of all the values of the test statistic generated by swapping the treatment status among participants that belong to the same randomisation stratum. The method accounts for the complexity of the randomisation and secures robust inference in small sample sizes (for further information, see and Gertler et al., 2014; Heckman et al., 2010b; Heckman, Moon, Pinto, Savelyev, & Yavitz, 2010a; Heckman, Pinto, & Savelyev, 2013). We seek to reject the null hypothesis that the no‐treatment group outperforms the treatment group in favour of the alternative hypothesis that the treated participants outperform the no‐treatment participants.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive, psychosocial, and behaviour gains at age 31 years from the Jamaica early childhood stimulation trial

Walker

Chang

Wright

et al. 2021

Child Psychology Psychiatry

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Background: There is little evidence on adult benefits from early childhood interventions in low and middle-income countries. We assessed adult cognition, psychosocial skills and behaviour from a stimulation trial conducted in Jamaica. Methods: Children with stunted growth (height-for age <À2SD of references) aged 9-24 months were enrolled in a two-year randomised-controlled trial of nutritional supplementation and/or stimulation. At mean age 31.79 (SD 0.40) years, 95 of 127 participants (74.8%; 53.7% male) were assessed. Children without stunted growth were also followed as a comparison group (64 of 84 participants, 76.2%). Measurements included IQ, executive function, mental health, psychosocial skills, personality traits and risk behaviours. A block permutation test, valid for small sample sizes, was used. Analyses accounted for the randomisation protocol, multiple hypothesis testing and attrition. Results: Treatment group participants (stimulation intervention with or without supplementation, n = 48) had significantly greater IQ (Hedges g effect size 0. 57; 95%CI 0.20, 0.95) and cognitive flexibility (0.61; 0.25, 0.98) compared with no-treatment (no-intervention and supplementation only, n = 47). They also had reduced depressive symptoms (0.61; 0.28, 1.00), increased grit (0.53; 0.16, 0.92) and conscientiousness (0.66; 0.31, 1.07), lower substance use (rank mean score, 0.45; 0.08, 0.81) and risk taking related to health and work (0.64; 0.27, 1.00). There were 18 significant outcomes of 33 assessed. Comparison participants had higher IQ than no-treatment (1.17; 0.81, 1.54) and treatment groups (0.62; 0.18, 1.07); and better executive function, lower social inhibition and risk taking than the no-treatment group. Conclusions: The wide-ranging benefits at 31 years from the stimulation intervention supports investment in larger scale programmes to promote early childhood development in disadvantaged children. The lower IQ in the treatment group compared with comparison participants, emphasises the need for continued efforts to prevent early childhood growth retardation.

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive, psychosocial, and behaviour gains at age 31 years from the Jamaica early childhood stimulation trial

Walker

Chang

Wright

et al. 2021

Child Psychology Psychiatry

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…1 Studies suggest that these children are at risk of not developing their full human capital potential (Behrman et al 2009;Black et al 2017;Hoddinott, Alderman, et al 2013;Hoddinott et al 2008;Maluccio et al 2009;Richter et al 2017;Victora et al 2008). Our paper contributes to a growing literature that investigates how interventions in early childhood can contribute to foster human-capital formation for at-risk children (e.g., Campbell et al 2014;Carneiro and Heckman 2004;Heckman 2007, 2009;Cunha et al 2010;Gertler et al 2014;Heckman et al 2010aHeckman et al , 2010bHeckman et al 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 83%

You are what your parents expect: Height and local reference points

Wang,

Puentes,

Behrman

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent estimates are that about 150 million children under five years of age are stunted, with substantial negative consequences for their schooling, cognitive skills, health, and economic productivity. Therefore, understanding what determines such growth retardation is significant for designing public policies that aim to address this issue. We build a model for nutritional choices and health with reference-dependent preferences. Parents care about the health of their children relative to some reference population. In our empirical model, we use height as the health outcome that parents target. Reference height is an equilibrium object determined by earlier cohorts' parents' nutritional choices in the same village. We explore the exogenous variation in reference height produced by a proteinsupplementation experiment in Guatemala to estimate our model's parameters. We use our model to decompose the impact of the protein intervention on height into price and reference-point effects. We find that the changes in reference points account for 65% of the height difference between two-year-old children in experimental and control villages in the sixth annual cohort born after the initiation of the intervention.

show abstract

“…We focus on children removed before the age of six and examine heterogeneous effects by gender. Our analysis is motivated by the growing literature showing the importance of early-life interventions (Cunha et al, 2006;Heckman, 2006;Cunha and Heckman, 2007;Almond and Currie, 2011;Heckman et al, 2013;Heckman and Mosso, 2014;Elango et al, 2015;Almond et al, 2017) and differential responses by gender (Heckman et al, 2010;Bertrand and Pan, 2013;Heckman et al, 2013;Elango et al, 2015;Conti et al, 2016;Heckman et al, 2017;Garcia et al, 2018;Autor et al, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We present all regression results separately for girls and boys. Our analysis of effects by gender is motivated by prior research, which shows that girls and boys may respond differently to social programs and family conditions (Heckman et al, 2010;Bertrand and Pan, 2013;Heckman et al, 2013;Elango et al, 2015;Conti et al, 2016;Heckman et al, 2017;Garcia et al, 2018;Autor et al, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Causal Impact of Removing Children from Abusive and Neglectful Homes

Bald¹,

Chyn

Hastings

et al. 2022

Journal of Political Economy

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper measures impacts of removing children from families investigated for abuse or neglect. We use removal tendencies of child protection investigators as an instrument. We focus on young children investigated before age 6 and find that removal significantly increases test scores and reduces grade repetition for girls. There are no detectable impacts for boys. This pattern of results does not appear to be driven by heterogeneity in pre-removal characteristics, foster placements, or the type of schools attended after removal. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that development of abused and neglected girls is more responsive to home removal.

show abstract

Analyzing Social Experiments as Implemented: A Reexamination of the Evidence from the Highscope Perry Preschool Program

Cited by 36 publications

References 17 publications

Cognitive, psychosocial, and behaviour gains at age 31 years from the Jamaica early childhood stimulation trial

Cognitive, psychosocial, and behaviour gains at age 31 years from the Jamaica early childhood stimulation trial

You are what your parents expect: Height and local reference points

The Causal Impact of Removing Children from Abusive and Neglectful Homes

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About