Medium-Term Impacts of Access to Daycare on School Outcomes: Experimental Evidence from Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

In this document we analyze the impacts of a large-scale intervention that provided access to daycare centers for children in low-income neighborhoods in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Our results suggest that the intervention had a positive impact on enrollment rates and on the number of years children were enrolled to daycare during early childhood. We also find that winning the lottery had a positive effect on how regularly children attended primary school during the academic year. Because of the high attrition rates in the sample, we are unable to conclude whether the lottery had a positive impact on medium-term academic outcomes like standardized tests scores and overall grades.

The Early Childhood Development Replication Crisis, and How Wearable Technologies Could Help Overcome It

“…This also matches quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of exposure to better school districts on future outcomes (Chetty et al, 2018). Next, Carneiro et al (2022) evaluates the impacts of being randomly assigned to pre-K teachers of different value-added (VA) in Ecuador. While being assigned to a higher VA teacher significantly increases children's cognitive and socio-emotional skills, effects are again linear: they are not larger for younger ages of exposure.…”

Public Childcare, Labor Market Outcomes of Caregivers, and Child Development: Experimental Evidence from Brazil

“…We observe no adverse impacts on daycare provision on children or parents. An even later follow-up demonstrates positive impacts on children's subsequent primary school attendance (Carneiro et al, 2021). These results are particularly notable because they come from an intervention that has been deployed at scale via public institutions in a large city.…”

Inference for rank-rank regressions

“…1 The resulting measures are important inputs to broader political and public debates about inequality, the importance of the family and the neighborhood into which children are born, and opportunities for children to grow out of poverty (Mogstad and Torsvik (2023)). Besides intergenerational mobility, regressions involving ranks have also been used in a range of other areas in economics such as education (e.g., Chetty et al (2011), Murphy and Weinhardt (2020), Carneiro et al (2023)), crime (e.g., Sharkey and Torrats-Espinosa (2017)), or migration (e.g., Ward (2022b)).…”