Impact of Early Childcare on Immigrant Children's Educational Performance

Luca Corazzini, Elena Meschi and Caterina Pavese

No 452, Working Papers from University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper investigates the impact of attending early childcare on immigrant children's cognitive outcomes. Our analysis makes use of administrative data on the entire population of students in the fth grade, collected by the Italian Institute for the Evaluation of the Educational System (INVALSI) for school years 2014/2015 to 2016/2017, matched to unique administrative records on early childcare availability at the municipal level. Our identication strategy exploits cross-sectional and time series variation in the provision of early childcare service across Italian municipalities as an instrument for individual attendance. Our results point out that the effect of early childcare attendance differs between native and immigrant children. Estimates show a positive and signicant effect on the language test scores of immigrant children, with the effect being mostly driven by females, by children with low-educated mothers and by children who, at home, speak a language highly dissimilar to Italian. Unlike immigrants, native students are negatively impacted by early childcare attendance, as reected in both language and math test scores. Effects are stronger on math test scores for females and for children with highly educated mothers.

Keywords: Childcare; Cognitive skills; Immigrant children; IV. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H75 I20 I28 J13 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36
Date: 2020-10, Revised 2020-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-eur and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.dems.unimib.it/repec/pdf/mibwpaper452.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Impact of early childcare on immigrant children’s educational performance (2021)
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:mib:wpaper:452

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Milano-Bicocca, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Matteo Pelagatti ().