for valuable comments. The views expressed in this chapter are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the funders or persons named here or the official views of the National Institutes of Health or of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

This paper estimates gender differences in life-cycle impacts across multiple domains of an influential enriched early childhood program targeted toward disadvantaged children that was evaluated by the method of random assignment. We assess the impacts of the program on promoting or alleviating population differences in outcomes by gender. For many outcomes, boys benefit relatively more from high-quality center childcare programs compared to low-quality programs. For them, home care, even in disadvantaged environments, is more beneficial than lower-quality center childcare for many outcomes. This phenomenon is not found for girls. We investigate the sources of the gender differentials in impacts.

This paper quantifies the experimentally evaluated life-cycle benefits of a widely implemented early childhood program targeting disadvantaged families. We join experimental data with nonexperimental data using economic models to forecast its life-cycle benefits. Our baseline estimate of the internal rate of return (benefit/cost ratio) is 13.7% (7.3). We conduct extensive sensitivity analyses to account for model estimation error, forecasting error, and judgments made about the empirical magnitudes of non-market benefits. We examine the performance of widely used, ad hoc estimates of long-term benefit/cost ratios based on short-term measures of childhood test scores and find them wanting.

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may The Life-cycle Benefits of an Influential Early Childhood Program December 2016Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. Heckman et al., 2010a,b), the Carolina Abecedarian Project (ABC) and the Carolina Approach to Responsive Education (CARE) (Ramey et al., 2000(Ramey et al., , 2012, and the Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP) (Gross et al., 1997;Duncan and Sojourner, 2013). IHDP was inspired by ABC/CARE (Gross et al., 1997).3 See, e.g., Kline and Walters (2016) and Weiland and Yoshikawa (2013). 4 Throughout this paper, we refer to health-related quality of life as quality of life. It is 1 increased parental labor income arising from subsidized childcare. 5Evidence from these programs is relevant for contemporary policy discussions because their main components are present in a variety of current interventions.6 About 19% of all African-American children are eligible for these programs today. 7Analyzing the benefits of programs with a diverse array of outcomes across multiple domains and periods of life is both challenging and rewarding. Doing so highlights the numerous ways through which early childhood programs enhance adult capabilities. We use a variety of measures to characterize program benefits. Instead of reporting only individual treatment effects or categories of treatment effects, our benefit/cost analyses account for all measured aspects of these programs, including the welfare costs of taxes to publicly finance them.We display the sensitivity of our estimates exclud...

for valuable comments. The views expressed in this chapter are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the funders or persons named here or the official views of the National Institutes of Health or of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.