Working Paper: NBER ID: w31694
Authors: William R. Dougan; Jorge Luis Garcia; Illia Polovnikov
Abstract: We offer a new analysis of a large-scale trial of an early-childhood education program that targeted premature, low-birthweight children. This targeting heavily oversampled twins, whose outcomes differed significantly from singletons’. Singletons’ gains in short-term cognition and age-18 non-cognitive skills were comparable to those of the Perry Preschool and Carolina Abecedarian Projects, supporting those programs’ scalability. For twins, however, the program generated smaller positive short-term gains and negative age-18 impacts. These outcome differences arise from differences in parents’ response to the program. A household production model suggests that the possibility of jointly supplying parenting to twins helps explain those differences.
Keywords: early childhood education; randomized trial; twins; cognitive skills; noncognitive skills
JEL Codes: C93; H83; I28; J13
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| parenting crowding out (twins) (J13) | cognitive skills (twins) (G53) |
| parental responses (J13) | cognitive skills (twins) (G53) |
| parental responses (J13) | cognitive skills (singletons) (G53) |
| parental labor force participation (J22) | parenting (twins) (J12) |
| Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP) (I15) | cognitive skills (singletons) (G53) |
| Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP) (I15) | cognitive skills (twins) (G53) |
| Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP) (I15) | parenting (twins) (J12) |
| Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP) (I15) | childcare (twins) (J13) |
| Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP) (I15) | childcare (singletons) (J13) |
| Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP) (I15) | age-3 cognition (singletons) (C20) |