Parental Investment, School Choice, and the Persistent Benefits of Intervention in Early Childhood

Lei Wang, Yiwei Qian, Nele Warrinnier, Orazio Attanasio, Scott Rozelle and Sean Sylvia
Additional contact information
Lei Wang: Shaanxi Normal University
Yiwei Qian: Stanford University
Nele Warrinnier: Queen Mary University of London and LICOS, KU Leuven
Orazio Attanasio: Yale University, the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS)
Sean Sylvia: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

No 931, Working Papers from Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance

Abstract: We present evidence from a randomized experiment testing the impacts of a six-month early childhood home-visiting program on child outcomes at school entry. Two and a half years after completion of the program, we find persistent effects on child working memory - a key skill of executive functioning that plays a central role in children’s development of cognitive and socio-emotional skills. We also find that the program had persistent effects on parental time investments and preschool enrolment decisions. Children were enrolled earlier and in higher quality preschools, the latter reflecting a shift in preferences over preschool attributes toward quality. Our findings imply an important role for the availability of high-quality subsequent schooling in sustaining the impacts of early intervention programs.

Keywords: Early Childhood Development; Parenting; China; Poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H11 I21 I28 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-exp, nep-ltv, nep-neu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sef/media/econ/research/workingpapers/2021/wp931.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:qmw:qmwecw:931

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nicholas Owen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).