Giving children a better start: preschool attendance and school-age profiles

We study the effect of pre-primary education on children's subsequent school outcomes by exploiting a unique feature of the Uruguayan household survey (ECH) that collects retrospective information on preschool attendance. A rapid expansion in the supply of pre-primary places over the last decade generates sufficient variation in the data to warrant identification. Using a within household estimator that only exploits differences in exposure across siblings, we find small gains from preschool attendance at early ages that magnify as children grow up. By age 16, children that attended preschool have accumulated more than 1 extra year of education and are 27 percentage points more likely to be in school compared to their siblings with no preschool education. We speculate that early grade repetition harms subsequent school progression and that pre-primary education appears as a successful policy option to prevent early grade failure and its long lasting consequences

Preschool and maternal labour market outcomes: evidence from a regression discontinuity design

Expanding preschool education has the dual goals of improving child outcomes and work incentives for mothers. This paper provides evidence on the second, identifying the impact of preschool attendance on maternal labor market outcomes in Argentina. A major challenge in identifying the causal effect of preschool attendance on parental outcomes is non-random selection into early education. We address this by relying on plausibly exogenous variation in preschool attendance that is induced when children are born on either side of Argentina's enrollment cutoff date of July 1. Because of enrollment cutoff dates, 4 year-olds born just before July 1 are 0.3 more likely to attend preschool. Our regression-discontinuity estimates compare maternal employment outcomes of 4 year-old children on either side of this cutoff, identifying effects among the subset of complying households (who are perhaps more likely to face constraints on their level 2 preschool attendance). Our findings suggest that, on average, 13 mothers start to work for every 100 youngest children in the household that start preschool (though, in our preferred specification, this estimate is not statistically significant at conventional levels). Furthermore, mothers are 19.1 percentage points more likely to work for more than 20 hours a week (i.e., more time than their children spend in school) and they work, on average, 7.8 more hours per week as consequence of their youngest offspring attending preschool. We find no effect on maternal labor outcomes when a child that is not the youngest in the household attends preschool. Finally, we find that at the point of transition from kindergarten to primary school some employment effects persist. Our preferred estimates condition on mother's schooling and other exogenous covariates, given evidence that mothers' schooling is unbalanced in the vicinity of the July 1 cutoff in the sample of 4 year-olds. Using a large set of natality records, we found no evidence that this is due to precise birth date manipulation by parents. Other explanations, like sample selection, are also not fully consistent with the data, and we must remain agnostic on this point. Despite this shortcoming, the credibility of the estimates is partly enhanced by the consistency of point estimates with Argentine research using a different EPH sample and sources of variation in preschool attendance (Berlinski and Galiani 2007). A growing body of research suggests that pre-primary school can improve educational outcomes for children in the short and long run (Blau and Currie 2006; Schady 2006). This paper provides further evidence that, ceteris paribus, an expansion in preschool education may enhance the employment prospects of mothers of children in preschool age

Market regulation and firm performance: the case of smoking bans in the UK

This paper analyzes the effects of a ban on smoking in public places upon firms and consumers. It presents a theoretical model and tests its predictions using unique data from before and after the introduction of smoking bans in the UK. Cigarette smoke is a public bad, and smokers and non-smokers differ in their valuation of smoke-free amenities. Consumer heterogeneity implies that the market equilibrium may result in too much uniformity, whereas social optimality requires a mix of smoking and non-smoking pubs (which can be operationalized via licensing). If the market equilibrium has almost all pubs permitting smoking (as is the case in the data) then a blanket ban reduces pub sales, profits, and consumer welfare. We collect survey data from public houses and find that the Scottish smoking ban (introduced in March 2006) reduced pub sales and harmed medium run profitability. An event study analysis of the stock market performance of pub-holding companies corroborates the negative effects of the smoking ban on firm performance

Unbundling Democracy: Tilly Trumps Schumpeter

). All remaining errors are our own. Abstract: Much recent political economy and political science literature views democracy in terms of political rights. This feature is particularly pronounced in the empirical literature. We expand on this view of democracy by reincorporating the role of civil liberties, which are at the core of modern democracy, in two ways. First, we present a conceptual framework that identifies four fundamental sources of potential differences in the evolution of political rights and civil liberties. Perhaps more importantly, we provide systematic, robust and varied empirical evidence on this differential evolution using cross-national panel data. Our two main results are: Civil liberties are far more persistent than political rights in affecting subsequent outcomes; Civil liberties are complementary to political rights in affecting subsequent outcomes, but the reverse is not the case. These two main results are robust to alternative measures of democracy as political rights, the addition of covariates, estimation techniques, and variations in our sample. In particular these results are invariant to whether or not the modernization hypothesis holds or the political natural resource curse exists. More generally, our analysis can be framed as an implementation and comparison of two different approaches to democracy: the electoral democracy view and the liberal democracy view. The data support the latter

Women out, children out : the effect of female labor on portuguese preschool enrollment rates

This article tests whether Portuguese female activity rates have increased preschool enrollment rates. Particularly during the last 20 years, Portuguese women have assumed new roles in the marketplace and have become active workers outside of the home environment. This change has encouraged more sensible decisions with respect to preschool enrollment. Using cointegration techniques, we concluded that female activity rates and real income per capita caused a long-term increase in preschool enrollment rates. Although the percentage of agricultural gross value added to the gross domestic product and the number of preschool institutes were also found to be significant in the estimated vector error correction model, their causal relationship with preschool enrollment was only short term.COMPETE; QREN; FEDER; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT