Substack

Sunday, July 2, 2017

The life-cycle benefits of early childhood education programs

The latest evidence in favour of the benefits of early childhood education programs come from Jorge Luis Garcia, James Heckman, Duncan Ermini Leaf, and Maria Jose Prados. In a new paper that combines experimental and non-experimental data from the US in a very large cohort of ages from zero to mid-thirties, they estimate the life-cycle benefits of early childhood education programs using an approach that goes beyond current narrowly focused analyses, 

Our estimates of the internal rate of return (benefit/cost ratio) range from 8.0% to 18.3% (1.52 to 17.40)... Our baseline estimate of the internal rate of return (benefit/cost ratio) is 13.7% (7.3).
The graphic below shows the net present value of the life-cycle cost-benefit gains over control, in terms of increases in own labour income (from 21 to retirement), incomes of parents, gains from reduced crimes, improvements in QALYs, and so on.   

1 comment:

Chinmaya Holla said...

Andrew Gelman's been generally unfavorable towards Heckman milking that one dataset for a while now: http://andrewgelman.com/2017/07/20/nobel-prize-winning-economist-become-victim-bog-standard-selection-bias/

Not that Gelman disagrees with the premise that ECE is very useful