Treatment Effects and the Measurement of Skills in a Prototypical Home Visiting Program

James Heckman, Bei Liu (), Mai Lu () and Jin Zhou
Additional contact information
Bei Liu: China Development Research Foundation
Mai Lu: China Development Research Foundation

No 13346, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper evaluates the causal impacts of an early childhood home visiting program for which treatment is randomly assigned. We estimate multivariate latent skill profiles for individual children and compare treatments and controls. We identify average treatment effects of skills on performance in a variety of tasks. The program substantially improves child language and cognitive, fine motor, and social-emotional skills development. Impacts are especially strong in the most disadvantaged communities. We go beyond reporting treatment effects as unweighted sums of item scores. Instead, we examine how the program affects the latent skills generating item scores and how the program affects the mapping between skills and item scores. We find that enhancements in latent skills explain at least 90% of conventional unweighted treatment effects on language and cognitive tasks. The program enhances some components of the function mapping latent skills into item scores. This can be interpreted as a measure of enhanced productivity in using given bundles of skills to perform tasks. This source explains at most 10% of the average estimated treatment effects.

Keywords: mechanisms; scaling; measurement; experiment; home visiting programs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 Z18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2020-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-neu
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13346.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp13346

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().