The Impacts of a Prototypical Home Visiting Program on Child Skills

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

No 15132, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper uses random assignment to estimate the causal impacts on child skills of a widely emulated early childhood home visiting program. We show the feasibility of replicating it at scale. We estimate vectors of latent skills for individual children and compare treatments and controls. The program substantially improves child language and cognitive, fine motor, and social-emotional skills. We go beyond reporting treatment effects as unweighted item scores. We determine whether the program affects the latent skills generating correct answers to lists of test items and how the program affects the mapping from skills to item scores. Enhancements in latent skills explain most of the conventional treatment effects for language and cognition. The program operates primarily by improving skills and not by improving how effectively skills are used. The program barely changes the map from latent skills to item test scores.

Keywords: home visiting programs; mechanisms; scaling; experiment; measurement (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J13 Z18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 113 pages
Date: 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Related works:
Working Paper: The Impact of a Prototypical Home Visiting Program on Child Skills (2020)
Working Paper: The Impacts of a Prototypical Home Visiting Program on Child Skills (2020)
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