Arbeitspapier

Cost-effective public daycare in a low-income economy benefits children and mothers

This paper evaluates the impacts of a public program that introduced access to part-time childcare centers for children younger than four years of age in poor urban areas in Nicaragua. We explore the effects of this program on several measures of children's and parental outcomes. Our identification strategy exploits the original randomization and the distance to the centers, using Instrumental Variables (IV) and Marginal Treatment Effects (MTE) methods to tackle imperfect compliance with the original treatment assignments. We present a theoretical model to rationalize our IV assumptions. We find a positive impact of 0.35 standard deviations on the personal-social domain of a widely used development test, and an impact of 14 percentage points on mothers' work participation. Our results are robust to different econometric specifications. We also find suggestive evidence that quality greatly matters for the impacts at the child level, but not at the mother level.

Language
Englisch

Bibliographic citation
Series: IDB Working Paper Series ; No. IDB-WP-1036

Classification
Wirtschaft
Single Equation Models; Single Variables: Cross-Sectional Models; Spatial Models; Treatment Effect Models; Quantile Regressions
Education: Government Policy
Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty: Government Programs; Provision and Effects of Welfare Programs
Subject
RCT
Early Childhood Development
Daycare
Latin America
Maternal labor force participation
Quality

Event
Geistige Schöpfung
(who)
Hojman, Andrés
López Bóo, Florencia
Event
Veröffentlichung
(who)
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)
(where)
Washington, DC
(when)
2019

DOI
doi:10.18235/0001849
Handle
Last update
10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET

Data provider

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Object type

  • Arbeitspapier

Associated

  • Hojman, Andrés
  • López Bóo, Florencia
  • Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)

Time of origin

  • 2019

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