Does Early Child Care Help or Hurt Children's Development?

Christina Felfe and Rafael Lalive

No 8484, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: More children than ever attend center-based care early in life. We study whether children who attend center-based care before age 3 have better or worse language and motor skills, socio-emotional maturity, and school readiness just before entering primary school. In data covering about 36,000 children in one West German state, we use a marginal treatment effects framework to show how causal effects vary with observed characteristics of children, parents, and care centers and with unobserved preferences for center-based care. Early center-based care benefits children with less educated mothers or foreign parents. Benefits increase when parents have a preference for center-based care. Centers with small playgroups and with experienced, trained, or full-time working staff produce the best effects. A modest expansion of the number of places in early care centers improves children's development, whereas a strong expansion has no significant effects.

Keywords: child care; child development; marginal treatment effects (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I38 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55 pages
Date: 2014-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (52)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp8484.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Does early child care help or hurt childrens's development? (2014)
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:dp8484

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 ().