The Impact of Child-Care Centers on Early Childhood Development

The following presentation provides the results of a study of the impacts of enrollment in child-care centers on cognitive development in children over the age of two. The data is taken from a random sample of 650 children (aged 6 months-5 years) living in Santiago, Chile. The model used evaluates the impact of attending a child-care center on early childhood development from a multi-dimensional perspective, including unobserved variables, such as family background, mother's unobserved abilities, local availability of centers, and local capacity in order to construct a data set and a framework with enough structure to be able to identify the effects of the treatment. The study finds that enrollment in child-care centers seems to boost child cognitive development among children older than two, even after controlling for selection.