Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Over 250,000 children are born every year in Chile. Given Chile’s high inequality, children have extremely varied early childhood experiences, depending on their immediate household contexts. While some children benefit from parents or caretakers who have higher levels of education and income, read books on parenting, buy better toys and have information on development benchmarks of their children, others do not. Such factors (between many others) impact a child’s development and are known to have long-lasting effects on their lives (Doyle et al. (2016), Duncan et al (2010), and Heckman (2008)).

In 2007, as part of the recommendations of the presidential advisory committee to reform child policy, the Chilean government started implementing a national policy to promote early childhood development and reduce inequalities at the beginning of life. This policy, known as Chile Crece Contigo (ChCC), was designed as a system of social protection with the main goal of protecting all children and their families by providing comprehensive support. To achieve this goal, the ChCC policy offers an extensive set of services (some universal and some targeted) through the local health providers based on standardized guidelines. This study looks to improve the limited existing evidence of this policy.

This paper focuses on one novel service offered as part of ChCC: the modalities of support for child development (MSCD). Consisting of workshops for children and their parents, this service is designed to foster and accelerate the learning process of those children who are lagging behind in their developmental benchmarks. The workshops use five different methodologies, with a particular methodology being assigned to a child only after a psychomotor evaluation by a specialist on his or her development needs. The interventions under each methodology vary in the number of sessions, frequency and duration. The main research question in this paper is "Did the modalities of support for child development (MSCD) reduce the gap in human capital formation between children who received help for enhancing their development trajectory and those who followed the usual path of development?"

The paper exploits variations in the provision of the service (only children with lags in development are offered the MSCDs) and non-compliance into treatment, to generate a valid control group. Based on information from an administrative dataset of detail clinical files between 2014-2019 that includes anthropometric measures, instruments applied (and their results), access to MSCDs and background information of children from an urban district in Santiago, Chile, a dynamic treatment effects model is estimated. From this model it is possible to estimate the effects on cognitive test scores of this intervention in the short and medium run, filling a gap of evidence in this area. A novelty of this paper is the fact that children can receive the service at different stages of their development and multiple times, allowing to test diminishing returns to investment of home-visits with respect to age. Preliminary results show positive impacts of the intervention on sub sequential periods of time closing the gap between those lagging and those who didn’t.