Essays on early childhood education

Abstract

Early childhood educations plays a fundamental role in human capital development. This dissertation studies skills development during early childhood. Chapter 1 focuses on early childhood intervention from birth to age 3. Most of the existing literature on such programs is limited to the average treatment effects. To analyze heterogeneity, this study estimates the distributional effect on children's cognitive skill from birth to age 3. Besides, it estimates the conditional quantile effects of two components in the treatment, family environment and child daycare, on cognitive skills. It finds smaller effects of daycare across the bottom of distribution than the top of distribution, whereas larger effects of family environment at the bottom of distribution than at the top. Finally, it finds weak complementarity between daycare and family environment in skill formation. Chapter 2 analyzes the peer effects of English language learners (ELL) on students' skill formation, intrigued by the fact that the rapid increase and dispersion of ELL in recent years raises a concern about how this phenomenon exerts influence on students performance at school. To my best knowledge, this paper is the first study to identify the peer effects of ELL on cognitive skills and noncognitive skills in one consistent framework thoroughly by using the most recent nationally representative data. It is revealed that there are significantly modest adverse effects on cognitive skills. The noncognitive skills are adversely affected, however insignificantly, when using student fixed effect models. In addition, as for heterogeneity, girls or advantaged students are harmed more. Moreover, the peer effects show nonlinear trend as the share of ELL is increasing. Finally, the adverse effects are more sizable in the higher grades.