Quantifying the Life-cycle Benefits of a Prototypical Early Childhood Program

Jorge Luis Garcia (), James Heckman, Duncan Ermini Leaf and María José Prados

No 23479, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper quantifies and aggregates the multiple lifetime benefits of an influential high-quality early childhood program with outcomes measured through midlife. Guided by economic theory, we supplement experimental data with non-experimental data to forecast the life-cycle benefits and costs of the program. Our point estimate of the internal rate of return is 13.7% with an associated benefit/cost ratio of 7.3. We account for model estimation and forecasting error and present estimates from extensive sensitivity analyses. This paper is a template for synthesizing experimental and non-experimental data using economic theory to estimate the long-run life-cycle benefits of social programs.

JEL-codes: C93 I28 J13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
Note: CH ED
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23479.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Quantifying the Life-Cycle Benefits of a Prototypical Early Childhood Program (2017)
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:nbr:nberwo:23479

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23479

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().