Public childcare benefits children and mothers: Evidence from a nationwide experiment in a developing country q

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Hojman, Andres; Boo, Florencia Lopez
• 署名单位: Inter-American Development Bank
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2022.104686
• 发表日期: 2022
• 关键词: Childcare; Female Labor Market Participation; child development; QUALITY; Latin America; RCT

摘要

This paper evaluates a public childcare program for children ages 0-4 in poor urban areas in Nicaragua. Our identification strategy exploits the program's neighborhood-level randomization as exogenous variation to tackle imperfect compliance with the original treatment assignments. We find a positive impact of 0.38 standard deviations on socio-emotional skills and a 12-percentage-point increase on mothers' work, which makes the program highly cost-effective. We do not find evidence of substantial heterogeneity of impacts across observed or unobserved household characteristics, and we present suggestive evidence of the importance of center quality for generating positive impacts.(c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).