Joint Analysis of Preschool Education and School Performance in Public Schools in Montevideo.

Abstract

This paper aims at explaining the academic performance of a sample of children starting their first year at public schools in Montevideo, Uruguay, during 1999. We are mainly in- terested in the effect of preschool education on the children’s academic results. Previous probit and OLS estimations suggested that preschool education has a positive impact on short and long term school performance. However, these results could be biased because a rather strong endogeinity of the preschool education variable. We solved this problem us- ing bivariate probit and treatment effects estimations. The results confirmed the bias and suggested that our previous estimations underestimated the positive effect of preschool educations. Thus, we found fairly strong empirical evidence suggesting that preschool education has a short and long term positive effect on these children’s resultspreschool education, school results, bivariate probit, treatment effects, Uruguay