Three Essays on the Economics of Early Education

Abstract

This dissertation is comprised of three essays investigating the impacts of the Child-Parent Centers, a high-quality early education program serving students in preschool through third grade and their families. All three papers use probability weighting methods in conjunction with additional estimation strategies to estimate causal impacts. The first two papers use data from the 2012 Midwest CPC expansion, a scale-up program of the original CPC program. The final paper uses data from the Chicago Longitudinal Study, which has tracked students that attended the CPC program in the mid-1980s. Essay 1 investigates the impacts of the first year of the Midwest CPC Expansion on school readiness. Weighting for both attrition and program participation, the CPC program has positive, significant impacts on school readiness. The significant relationship holds true for subgroups tested, including full and part-day preschool, Spanish speakers, and by free lunch eligibility. The second essay investigates the impacts of neighborhood crime on preschool achievement. Using a weighting approach combined with difference-in-differences, I find that high neighborhood crime has a significant, negative impact on school readiness, at least for students that attended publicly-provided preschool, either district preschool or Head Start. However, there were no significant impacts of crime on school readiness for students that attended the CPC program. This may be due, in part, to the significantly higher rates of parent involvement of families that attended a CPC in a high crime neighborhood. Finally, the third essay uses data from the Chicago Longitudinal Study and both propensity and coefficient bounding approaches to estimate the impact of attending CPC on high school choice. While CPC has no significant impact on a student’s decision to attend their neighborhood high school, CPC students take into account the quality of their neighborhood high school when making the school choice decision. Similarly, CPC students are more likely to attend a higher quality public school, or a magnet or private school than the control students.