Does Head Start Improve Children's Life Chances? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Design

By Jens Ludwig, Douglas L. Miller. Social Science Research Network, 2005

1,124 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper exploits a new source of variation in Head Start funding to identify the program's effects on health and schooling. In 1965 the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) provided technical assistance to the 300 poorest counties to develop Head Start proposals. The result was a large and lasting discontinuity in Head Start funding rates at the OEO cutoff for grant-writing assistance. We find evidence of a large drop at the OEO cutoff in mortality rates for children from causes that could be affected by Head Start, as well as suggestive evidence for a positive effect on educational attainment.

Subfields: Education, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a334a097b383d8d8d98635872acdaa9bdc858d12

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Citations in the corpus

Experimental Evidence on the Effect of Childhood Investments on Postsecondary Attainment and Degree Completion. NBER Working Paper No. 17533. (2011, positive): “In each of these studies, treatment effects had reemerged in adulthood as increased educational attainment, enhanced labor market attachment, and reduced crime (Deming, 2009; Garces, Thomas, & Currie, 2002; Ludwig & Miller, 2007).”
Impacts of a prekindergarten program on children's mathematics, language, literacy, executive function, and emotional skills. (2013, methodology): “…functional form of the relation between outcome and the forcing variable is one of the chief challenges in RD analysis (Imbens & Lemieux, 2008; Ludwig & Miller, 2007), when we specified a linear relation between the two variables, we did so within a window, or bandwidth, on either side of the…”
Spring Forward at Your Own Risk: Daylight Saving Time and Fatal Vehicle Crashes (2016, methodology): “CCT refers to the bandwidth selector of Calonico, Cattaneo, and Titiunik (2014a); IK is Imbens and Kalyanaraman (2012); CV is the cross-validation method of Ludwig and Miller (2007).”
Regression Discontinuity Designs With Multiple Rating-Score Variables (2012, background): “Some recent examples of the application of RD designs in educational research include studies of Reading First (Gamse, Bloom, Kemple, & Jacob, 2008), Head First (Ludwig & Miller, 2007), public college admission policies (Kane, 2003; Niu & Tienda, 2009), and remedial education (Jacob & Lefgren, 2004;”
Regression discontinuity designs with unknown discontinuity points: Testing and estimation (2015, methodology): “Our approach is based on and extend the CV method in Wu and Chu (1993b).43 Di¤erent from the CV method of Ludwig and Miller (2005), Wu and Chu (1993b) eliminate the boundary e¤ect by projecting or re ecting the data at the discontinuity point.”
Robust Data-Driven Inference in the Regression-Discontinuity Design (2014, methodology): “A popular alternative is to employ cross-validation, as done for example by Ludwig and Miller (2007).”
Field experiments in labor economics (2010, background): “…studies, natural experiments and field experiments suggest that early education interventions can have significant effects on lifetime outcomes (Currie and Thomas 2005, Currie 2001, Garces et al. 2002, Behrman et al. 2004, Todd and Wolpin 2006, Ludwig and Miller 2007, Heckman et al. 2010).”
Simple Local Polynomial Density Estimators (2018, methodology): “We also illustrate its performance with an empirical application employing the canonical Head Start data in the context of RD designs (Ludwig and Miller 2007).”