published as 'Does Starting Universal Childcare Earlier Influence Children's Skill Development?' in: Demography, 2020, 57 (1), 61-98.
While recent studies mostly find that attending child care earlier improves the skills of children from low socio-economic and non-native backgrounds in the short-run, it remains unclear whether such positive effects persist. We identify the short- and medium-run effects of early child care attendance in Germany using a fuzzy discontinuity in child care starting age between December and January. This discontinuity arises as children typically start formal child care in the summer of the calendar year in which they turn three.
Combining rich survey and administrative data, we follow one cohort from age five to 15 and examine standardised cognitive test scores, non-cognitive skill measures, and school track choice. We find no evidence that starting child care earlier affects children's outcomes in the short- or medium-run. Our precise estimates rule out large effects for children whose parents have a strong preference for sending them to early child care.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.