Quantiles of the Gain Distribution of an Early Childhood Intervention

Erich Battistin (), Carlos Lamarche and Enrico Rettore

No 13101, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We offer a new strategy to identify the distribution of treatment effects using data from the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP), a relatively understudied early-childhood intervention for low birth-weight infants. We introduce a new policy parameter, QCD, which denotes quantiles of the effect distribution conditional on latent neonatal health. The dependence between potential outcomes originates from a new class of factor models where latent health can affect the location and shape of distributions. We first show that QCD depends on quantiles of marginal outcome distributions given latent health. We then achieve identification of these marginal distributions and QCD by proxying latent health with neonatal anthropometrics and accounting for measurement error in these proxies. The effects of enrolling in IHDP are widely distributed across children and depend on neonatal health. Moreover, the large average effects documented in past work for close to normal birth weight children from low-income families are driven by a minority of children in this group.

Keywords: treatment effect distributions; early childhood; factor models; policy evaluation; quantile regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C13 C21 I14 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 46 pages
Date: 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published - published in: Journal of Applied Econometrics , 2024, 39 (6), 1045-1064

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp13101.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Quantiles of the gain distribution of an early childhood intervention (2024)
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:dp13101

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 ().