Estimating, Bounding, and Decomposing the Effects of a Parent-Directed School Readiness Program

Flávio Cunha, Qinyou Hu, Andrea Salvati, Kenneth I. Wolpin and Rui Zeng

No 13100, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: We evaluate JumpStart, a parent-directed school-readiness program run by a Houston-area school district, in a randomized trial spanning three cohorts. Being offered the program raises scores on a curriculum-aligned assessment by 7.6 percentage points and parental investment by 0.26 standard deviations. A model of skill formation with endogenous inputs and program participation yields an average treatment effect of completing the program of about 9 percentage points, and attributes roughly a quarter of this effect to higher measured investment. Nonparametric bounds corroborate the average effect, and a mediation analysis that relaxes part of the model's structure supports the decomposition.

Keywords: early childhood development; human capital development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 I21 I24 I28 J13 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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