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| Abstract Title:
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| Early Childhood Intervention and Life-Cycle Skill Development: Evidence from Head Start
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| Graduate Student Presenter:
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David Deming
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| Name of the Author(s) and Affiliation(s):
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Harvard University
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This paper provides new evidence on the long-term benefits of Head Start for a recent birth cohort of children. I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth Mother-Child Supplement (CNLSY) to track children from before birth to early adulthood. The impact of Head Start is identified by comparing siblings in the same family who differ in their participation in the program. I assess the validity of this comparison directly by controlling for a wide variety of pre-treatment covariates, including a pre-test. These covariates are powerful predictors of child outcomes but are uncorrelated with within-family differences in Head Start participation. I find that Head Start participation leads to a long-term impact of about 0.23 standard deviations on a summary index of young adult outcomes. This gain is large enough to eliminate half of the long-term outcome gap between the bottom and 2nd permanent income quartile in the sample, and is about 80 percent as large as the impact of “model” programs such as Perry Preschool and Abecedarian. Following a cohort of Head Start participants over time also allows for an examination of the life-cycle benefits of early skill formation. The evidence strongly suggests that non-cognitive skill gains are an important component of the benefits of early intervention.Using the NLSY-79 cohort to project the effect of Head Start on adult wages, I estimate that investment in one year of the program at age four generates an internal private rate of return of 7.4%.
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