Preschool as a Gateway to Health Care Services for Low-Income Children

Maya Rossin-Slater, Adrienne Sabety and Aileen Wu

No 34677, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We find that public preschools are a gateway to health care services. Low-income children born before their state’s public preschool entry cutoff date—who can start preschool younger than those born after—are more likely to receive speech-language pathology, occupational or physical therapy, mental health, hearing or vision, and dental services, both inside and outside of school. The increased preventive dental care at age three is followed by a reduced likelihood of restorative dental care at older ages, suggesting the increase in services is welfare-improving.

JEL-codes: I18 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-hea
Note: CH ED EH PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34677.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

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:nbr:nberwo:34677

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w34677
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().