Will Sooner be Better?

Research team:

• Denis Fougère (OSC and LIEPP)
• Olivier Filatriau (INSEE)
• Maxime Tô (UCL)

Recent literature has found an important impact of cognitive and noncognitive skills accumulated during childhood on adult outcomes, such as health, education or labor market income (Almond and Currie (2011), Heckman, Stixrud, and Urzua (2006)).

Timing of school enrollment influences the formation of skills. However, findings are somewhat contradictory. They depend on the country and the age of enrollment. Our study contributes to this literature by providing new evidence of a positive impact of early
enrollment on skills.

Our contribution is original under several aspects:

• we propose a new identification strategy based on nonexperimental data;
• we measure the impact of early enrollment on both cognitive and noncognitive skills until grade 9;
• the French framework allows us to assess a very early intervention that occurs at age 2 whereas other contributions study the effect of school enrollment at older ages.

Find here the CEPR Working Paper.

To learn more, click on the picture below (pdf):  Will Sooner be Better?