Short and Long Term Effects of Preschool Attendance on Cognitive and Non‐Cognitive Outcomes of Arab Children

Educational interventions at young ages can have large long-term impacts on adult outcomes. These findings support the persistent interest of policy-makers in universal preschool programs as a means to reduce future income inequality and promote intergenerational mobility. The question is, whether universal preschool indeed improves long-term outcomes, and through what mechanisms. Unfortunately, the evidence on the impact of such policies is scarce and mixed. A variety of issues remain unresolved, such as the impact of universal preschool on children's test scores by subjects, or the dynamic impact of universal preschool on test scores, non-cognitive and social skills during school years. The proposed research agenda aims to fill this gap. For this purpose, we will take advantage of exogenous variation generated in the provision of public preschool education over time and across towns in Israel, due to the implementation of the Preschool Law for ages 3 and 4 starting in year 2000. We will focus on the Arab population, which was the main beneficiary of the first phase of the Law implementation and examine a wide set of children’s cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes at the elementary, middle, and high school level as well as some longer term outcomes such as test scores in psychometric exams and college attendance. We will provide evidence on the heterogeneity of the effects across different demographic and socio-economic characteristics such as gender, number of siblings, parental education, parental income, and more. Noteworthy, we will examine the dynamic impacts of the intervention as we will be able to follow the same children over time across a rich set of educational outcomes. Finally, we will examine the indirect impacts of providing preschool education to younger siblings on their older siblings.