Cognitive and Non-Cognitive Costs of Daycare 002 for Girls

Abstract

Exploiting admission thresholds in a Regression Discontinuity Design, we study the causal e↵ects of daycare at age 0-2 on cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes at age 8-14. One additional month in daycare reduces IQ by 0.5% (4.5% of a standard deviation). E↵ects for conscientiousness are small and imprecisely estimated. Psychologists suggest that children in daycare experience fewer one-to-one interactions with adults, which should be particularly relevant for girls who are more capable than boys of exploiting cognitive stimuli at an early age. In line with this interpretation, losses for girls are larger and more significant, especially in a✏uent families. JEL-Code: J13, I20, I28, H75

Early School Exposure, Test Scores, and Noncognitive Outcomes

“…3 These studies look at effects of early education at school entry (e.g., kindergarten class in the United States) or immediately before school entry (e.g., prekindergarten in the United States). There is a much larger literature on early childhood programs that often cover children as young as two to three years of age (see, e.g., Baker, Gruber, and Milligan 2008;Keane 2010, 2011;Blanden et al 2014;Cornelissen et al 2018;Datta Gupta and Simonsen 2010;Fort, Ichino, and Zanella 2016;Mogstad 2011, 2015;and Loeb et al 2007). Baker (2011), Elango et al (2016), and Ruhm and Waldfogel (2012) provide overview articles of the literature on the effects of early childhood education.…”

How does grandparent childcare affect labor supply?

“…The downside of this expanded formal childcare solution is that it may have undesirable consequences for the development of the children from relatively affluent families (the marginal group that benefits, for example, from the expansion of public childcare services) relative to informal family care. Evidence that this is the case has been provided for Italy [13] and Canada [3]. Daycare has been shown in these studies to reduce the cognitive (e.g.…”

“…Childcare provided by grandparents helps young working mothers, but reduces the labor supply of older women Keywords: grandparents, childcare, work, retirement [3]. Figure 1 shows the proportion of families using informal childcare arrangements as well as hours of use in 2014 in Europe, by age of the child.…”

“…Previous work of the author contains a larger number of background references for the material presented here, and has been used intensively in all major parts of this article [1], [3], [12].…”

Cost-Effective Public Daycare in a Low-Income Economy Benefits Children and Mothers

“…There is also evidence of benefits from large-scale interventions as Head Start, a nationwide program reaching almost one million poor children in the United States (Carneiro and Ginja, 2014;Kline and Walters, 2016), as well as public government programs in Spain, Germany and Norway (Felfe et al, 2015;Felfe and Lalive, 2018;Drange and Havnes, 2019). Child care has also been shown to have no effect (Carta and Rizzica, 2018) or even negative effects on some children, as shown by recent studies of high quality childcare for 0-2 2 year-olds in Bologna (Fort et al, 2016), Quebec (Baker et al, 2008(Baker et al, , 2015Kottelenberg and Lehrer, 2017), the US (Herbst and Tekin, 2010), and Denmark (Gupta and Simonsen, 2010), and for universal child care in Norway (Havnes and Mogstad, 2015). Negative effects are more likely when the children attending daycare are not necessarily poor (as in the Quebec, Norway and Bologna studies), so the quality of the alternative care is comparatively high.…”