Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/223788 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 13346
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
This paper evaluates the causal impacts of an early childhood home visiting program for which treatment is randomly assigned. We estimate multivariate latent skill profiles for individual children and compare treatments and controls. We identify average treatment effects of skills on performance in a variety of tasks. The program substantially improves child language and cognitive, fine motor, and social-emotional skills development. Impacts are especially strong in the most disadvantaged communities. We go beyond reporting treatment effects as unweighted sums of item scores. Instead, we examine how the program affects the latent skills generating item scores and how the program affects the mapping between skills and item scores. We find that enhancements in latent skills explain at least 90% of conventional unweighted treatment effects on language and cognitive tasks. The program enhances some components of the function mapping latent skills into item scores. This can be interpreted as a measure of enhanced productivity in using given bundles of skills to perform tasks. This source explains at most 10% of the average estimated treatment effects.
Subjects: 
experiment
scaling
mechanisms
home visiting programs
measurement
JEL: 
J13
Z18
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
621.64 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.