The Impact of Pre-school on Adolescents' Outcomes: Evidence from a Recent English Cohort

Patricia Apps (), Silvia Mendolia and Ian Walker ()

No 6971, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper investigates the relationship between attendance at nursery school and children's outcomes in adolescence. In particular, we are interested in child cognitive development at ages 11, 14 and 16, intentions towards tertiary education, economic activity in early adulthood, and in a group of non-cognitive outcomes, such as risky health behaviours (smoking, early pregnancy, use of cannabis) and personality traits (feelings and commitments about school; psychological well-being). Using matching methods to control for a very rich set of child's and family's characteristics, we find that pre-school childcare largely improves results in cognitive tests at age 11 and 14 and 16, and has a positive effect on intentions towards further education and economic activity at age 19-20. Positive effects are especially noticeable for children coming from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. Results on non-cognitive outcomes are more mixed: we do not find any evidence of improvement in psychological well-being, but we do find some positive effects on health behaviours.

Keywords: child outcomes; childcare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2012-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem, nep-lab, nep-ltv and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published - published in: Economics of Education Review, 2013, 37, 183-199

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp6971.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The impact of pre-school on adolescents’ outcomes: Evidence from a recent English cohort (2013)
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:dp6971

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 ().