Quantity and quality of childcare and children’s educational outcomes
利用英格兰出生日期断点，研究免费学前教育增加约3.5个月对5岁学业成绩的影响，发现总体效果小，但在质量评级高的环境中效果更大，且效果在7岁时消失。
Abstract Policy-makers wanting to support child development can choose to adjust the quantity or quality of publicly funded universal pre-school. To assess the impact of such changes, we estimate the effects of an increase in free pre-school education in England of about 3.5 months at age 3 on children’s school achievement at age 5. We exploit date-of-birth discontinuities that create variation in the length and starting age of free pre-school using administrative school records linked to nursery characteristics. Estimated effects are small overall, but the impact of the additional term is substantially larger in settings with the highest inspection quality rating but not in settings with highly qualified staff. Estimated effects fade out by age 7.