Q2. What are the future works mentioned in the paper "Giving children a better start pre-school attendance and school-age profiles" ?
This paper uses micro data from the Uruguayan Encuesta Continua de Hogares ( ECH ) to study the short and medium term effects of preschool attendance on school progression among children aged 7-16. Although the authors have no way to identify in their data the precise mechanism through which small initial differences tend to be exacerbated as children grow older, one explanation is that the initial penalty suffered by children who did not attend preschool gets compounded by the state dependency in grade repetition. If the ( assumed ) remedial effect of grade failure is small or not existent, early grade failure may worsens children 's later school progression inducing further grade failure and explaining the diverging paths found in this paper. Starting from age 13 the authors find significant evidence that untreated individuals are more likely to drop out of school compared to treated individuals.
Q3. How many years of preschool did the ECH survey collect?
The authors have a sample of 25,696 children over five years, 90% of them attended at least one year of preschool with an average of 1.74 years of preschool.
Q4. What is the explanation for the increase in preschool attendance?
One explanation for this might be the secular rise in women's education, so that mothers of younger children are on average more educated, which at the same time might be correlated with higher preschool enrollment.
Q5. What is the reason why the results are remarkably robust to the inclusion of household fixed effects?
Results are remarkably robust to the inclusion of household fixed effects, although this is largely due to the circumstance that the point estimates become less precise and the confidence intervals become wider.
Q6. Why do the authors restrict the sample to children of the head of the household?
The authors restrict the sample to children of the head of the household due to the key role that the within siblings differences strategy plays in the identification of the parameter of interest.
Q7. How did the government achieve this objective?
Rather than increasing the number of compulsory school years by raising school leaving age, the government opted to achieve this objective by lowering entry age.
Q8. What are the factors that affect the probability of attending preschool?
Parental education, levels of permanent income and wealth, family background and tastes, parents' labor force status, neighborhood characteristics - just to quote a few- are all likely to affect both the probability of attending preschool and later progression in school.
Q9. How many years of delay have children who did not attend preschool?
If one takes the household fixed effect regressions, these imply that by age 12 children who did not attend preschool have accumulated already a third of a year of delay.
Q10. How many years of education do treated individuals have?
Again differences grow monotonically with age, so that by age 16, treated individuals have 1.13 extra years of education compared to non-treated individuals.
Q11. How many years of education have children completed?
on average children have completed around half a year of education less than one would expect if they had all enrolled at age 6, progressed regularly and stayed on until age 16 (in which case one will expect 5.55 years of completed education).
Q12. How many years of education did children attend preschool?
By age 16 children who attended preschool are 27 percentage points more likely to be in school and have accumulated more than one extra year of education.
Q13. What was the main reason for the expansion of the public preschool system?
The lack of teaching infrastructures was a major constraint to a further expansion of the system and for this reason, in 1995 ANEP (Administration Nacional de Educación Pública), the government agency in charge of public education, started an ambitious building plan which aimed at expanding preschool provision in public primary schools.
Q14. What is the main reason why children who attend preschool are more likely to attend public school?
Although the authors have no way to identify in their data the precise mechanism through which small initial differences tend to be exacerbated as children grow older, one explanation is that the initial penalty suffered by children who did not attend preschool gets compounded by the state dependency in grade repetition.
Q15. How many years of education have children who attended preschool already accumulated?
Column (4), where only basic controls are included, shows that by age 8 children that attended preschool have already accumulated 0.15 more years of education compared to those who did not attend preschool.