Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In 2007 a large-scale early childhood policy called Chile Grows with You (ChGWY) was implemented. One of its main features was the movement from a biomedical to a bio-psychosocial approach in the treatment of children development. Such movement included Integral Home Visits (IHV) provided by the local public health services. The goal of this service was to generate changes in the household environment, promote interactive playing, and improve techniques of caregivers to stimulate children’s development.

In this paper, I estimate the effects of such home visits on children’s development measured as standardized test scores at the age of 8 and 10. For that, I exploit variations in the provision of the service (only children with vulnerabilities are offered the visits) and use non-compliance into treatment to generate a valid control group. By using a new nationally representative administrative dataset of children born between the years 2007 and 2010 (which includes information about take-up of services, and socio-economic characteristic of the household) I estimate the effects of being treated through a nonparametric matching estimator with fixed effects by health provider. Preliminary results show positive results on test scores, and variations on treatment effects based on the experience of the service provider.