Cognitive and Noncognitive Costs of Day Care at Age 0–2 for Children in Advantaged Families Article Swipe

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Regression discontinuity design Personality Psychology Cognition Big Five personality traits Demography Day care Developmental psychology Population Intelligence quotient Regression analysis Medicine Social psychology Statistics Psychiatry Pathology Nursing Sociology Mathematics

Margherita Fort , Andrea Ichino , Giulio Zanella ·

YOU? · · 2019 · Open Access · · DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/704075 · OA: W2939298651

Exploiting admission thresholds to the Bologna daycare system, we show using RDD that one additional daycare month at age 0-2 reduces IQ by 0.5% (4.7% of a s.d.) at age\n8-14 in a relatively affluent population. The magnitude of this negative effect increases with family income. Similar negative impacts are found for personality traits. These\nfindings are consistent with the hypothesis from psychology that children in daycare experience fewer one-to-one interactions with adults, with negative effects in families\nwhere such interactions are of higher quality. We embed this hypothesis in a model that lends structure to our RDD.