Who benefits from universal child care?: Estimating marginal returns to early child care attendance

Thomas Cornelissen; Christian Dustmann; Anna Raute; Uta Schönberg

doi:10.1086/699979

Who benefits from universal child care? Estimating marginal returns to early child care attendance

Thomas Cornelissen, Christian Dustmann, Anna Raute, Uta Schönberg

Economics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the heterogeneous treatment effects of a universal child care (preschool) program in Germany by exploiting the exogenous variation in attendance caused by a reform that led to a large staggered expansion across municipalities. Drawing on novel administrative data from the full population of compulsory school entry examinations, we find that children with lower (observed and unobserved) gains are more likely to select into child care than children with higher gains. This pattern of reverse selection on gains is driven by unobserved family background characteristics: children from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to attend child care than children from advantaged backgrounds but have larger treatment effects because of their worse outcome when not enrolled in child care.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	2356–2409
Number of pages	54
Journal	Journal of Political Economy
Volume	126
Issue number	6
Early online date	1 Aug 2018
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1086/699979
Publication status	Published - 26 Nov 2018

Bibliographical note

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10.1086/699979

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Thomas Cornelissen
- tc1021york.acuk
- Economics - Personal Chair, Former employee
Person: Academic

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Who benefits from universal child care? Estimating marginal returns to early child care attendance

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Thomas Cornelissen

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