Measuring Skills and Understanding the Mechanism for Boosting Skill Development through Early Childhood Intervention

Description

Early childhood is a crucial stage of development and education in these early years can have long-lasting effects. Many early childhood education interventions have shown significant positive impacts on children's skill development. Some even lead to positive effects on long-term labor market outcomes such as education and wages. Despite much research in this area, several questions remain unanswered in this field, including: (a) how to measure skill and skill development across different ages based on different skill measure instruments; (b) what are the key mechanisms for the successful early childhood interventions to boost children skill development and even generate long-term effects (post-intervention period) on children's skill development; (c) what are the costeffective policies to boost children skill development.In this proposal, we will conduct the new round longitudinal data collection for the largest early childhood intervention in China: the China REACH (Huachi) project, in which we will follow these children up to the teenage range in 2024. We will use longitudinal data from 2015--2017, 2019, and 2024, and will develop research in three directions: First, we plan to develop a framework to measure skills and to evaluate the dynamic formation and growth of children's skills, even if the skills are measured by different instruments at different ages. Second, we plan to examine how interactions among the child, parent (caregiver), and home visitor affect children's skill development and the impacts of early childhood education intervention during the post-intervention period. Third, we will implement different counterfactual policies (i.e., cash transfer, home visiting, and center-based early childhood education) to evaluate their costeffectiveness policies for children's skill development and household welfare.