Home visiting at scale and child development

Most evidence on the effects of policies to promote child development refers to pilot programs implemented under tightly-controlled circumstances. We provide novel evidence on the effects of home visiting delivered at scale. The program we study, Cuna Mas in Peru, was started from scratch in 2012 and, within 3 years, was delivering weekly home visits to over 67,000 children in rural areas. Identification comes from random assignment of municipalities to treatment and control conditions. We show that, after approximately 2 years, children randomly assigned to treatment have child development scores that are 0.10 standard deviations higher than those assigned to control. The estimated benefit-cost ratio of the intervention is 5.4.