We study the relative effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and interaction of family- and schoolbased learning interventions using a randomized controlled trial in Colombia that assigns children to a parental engagement program, a teacher professional development program, both, or a control group....

Reducing poverty is a central policy priority in many countries, also in wealthy countries with comprehensive universal support systems, such as the Nordic welfare states. This study examines policy options designed to support families with preschool-aged children and their implications for...

Viet Nam’s investment in its youngest generation is fundamentally an investment in the country’s future human capital. Today, over 10 million Vietnamese children under age 6 (with another one million expected in the next five years) will reach working age by 2040. This cohort is projected to...

The Head Start program, launched in 1965 and targeted to children from disadvantaged backgrounds, remains the largest early childhood care and education (ECE) program in the United States and the only one deployed at the federal level. As such, the Head Start literature spans several decades and...

Early childhood programmes frequently lose effectiveness at scale, yet the role of the workforce remains poorly understood. We document substantial heterogeneity in workforce effectiveness in England's national home-visiting programme for first-time teenage mothers, despite a highly-structured...

This paper provides large-scale evidence linking the economic effects of childcare programs to social skills measured in adulthood. We examine Finland's first national public childcare program, and document that it increased parental labor supply -through retirement- while reducing the...

The Head Start program, launched in 1965 and targeted to children from disadvantaged backgrounds, remains the largest early childhood care and education (ECE) program in the United States and the only one deployed at the federal level. As such, the Head Start literature spans several decades and...

Women's employment remains highly sensitive to childcare constraints, making childcare availability a critical lever for supporting mothers' labor force attachment. We study the effects of expanded full-day programming in Head Start, using the 2016 federal funding initiative that targeted...