Suchergebnisse

I exploit the staggered roll-out of a universal early childhood development program in Chile to assess the impact of a comprehensive approach to early childhood development on outcomes in middle childhood. Using variation across time and municipalities, I study outcomes such as school performance, cognitive development, parental stress, household relationships, and health. I use administrative data on students as well as newborns in Chile, standardized test scores of all 4th graders, and an extensive early childhood development survey. I find positive and significant effects on school performance. The effect is less pronounced for girls and the socioeconomically vulnerable population. The improvements in learning outcomes are driven by improvements in intra-household relations. Comprehensive programs are powerful tools but have several flaws.

This paper examines the effect of prior participation in early childhood developmental programs, considered endogenous, upon 7-19 years olds' school enrollment and grade progression in rural North India. It hopes both to extend to less developed countries recent influential research on the long-term benefits of early childhood interventions in the United States, and to make a case for the inclusion of such interventions amongst developing nations' policy initiatives toward expanding schooling. Analysis of data from the World Bank's 1997-98 Survey of Living Conditions in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar yields the findings that early childhood developmental program attendance at ages 0-6 raises the probability of school enrollment among average 7-19 year olds by 31 percentage points, and that this beneficial early experience also significantly hastens students' grade progression.

This comparative study examined how participation in an early childhood development (ECD) program, Better Beginnings, Better Futures, for children (ages 4-8) relates to sense of community (SOC) in later adolescence (ages 18-19). Youths' stories ( N = 96) about community experiences, collected by semistructured, open-ended interviews, were quantitatively coded for several narrative dimensions (specificity, positivity, prosocial content, and meaning-making) and for elements of SOC (membership, influence, needs fulfillment, and shared emotional connection). Findings show a significant positive relationship between all narrative dimensions and the total SOC score. Better Beginnings youths' stories ( n = 64) were significantly higher on specificity and shared emotional connection than comparison youth ( n = 32). Findings have implications for community-based ECD programs to impact later adolescence SOC and for using narratives to study these effects.

Intro -- Contents -- Tables -- Figures -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- The Nature and Importance of Local Economic Development Benefits, and How They Are Affected by Labor Demand and Labor Supply -- Estimated Economic Development Effects of Well-Designed Business Incentive Programs -- The Economic Development Effects of High-Quality Early Childhood Programs -- Design Matters -- Dealing with the Known Unknowns -- Bringing the Future into the Present -- Who Benefits? -- Locality Matters -- The National Perspective -- The Ethics of Early Childhood Programs and Business Incentives -- Extending Economic Development Analysis to Other Human Development Programs -- Thinking and Acting Locally -- References -- The Author -- Index -- About the Institute.