Abstract
We investigated the perceived value of government programs on early-childhood development as a means of reducing childhood poverty. We incorporated preferences for the process as well as the outcome by developing two stated-preference survey instruments. One survey directly elicited respondents’ willingness to pay specifically for high-quality, intensive, early-childhood development programs at federal and state levels. A second survey elicited respondents’ preferences for increasing or decreasing taxes and reallocating expenditures between other government programs and early-childhood programs. We found that respondents cared greatly about how childhood poverty was reduced, not just reducing poverty per se. The perceived effectiveness of a program and ideological perspective were found to be important determinants of preferences for a poverty-reduction program. Respondents across all groups, including conservatives and respondents who perceived the effectiveness of early-childhood programs to be low, were not in favor of reducing the early-childhood program.
Highlights
High childhood poverty in the United States has been associated with high-school dropout rates among native-born children (Heckman & LaFontaine, 2010) and Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core
We investigated protest responses in the contingent valuation (CV) survey by identifying respondents who indicated that they did not vote for the program because they were against any tax increase
Respondents in the highest 30% of the ideology factor-score distribution were classified as liberals and respondents in the lowest 30% of the distribution were classified as conservatives
Summary
High childhood poverty in the United States has been associated with high-school dropout rates among native-born children (Heckman & LaFontaine, 2010) and Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. The total economic value of increased production and higher quality of life that would accrue if childhood poverty were eliminated in the United States was estimated to be $500 billion per year in 2008 dollars or 4% of total GDP (Holzer, Schanzenbach, Duncan & Ludwig, 2008). There is compelling evidence that investing in early-childhood education for disadvantaged children has long-term economic benefits to program participants and non-participants alike (Barnett & Masse, 2007; Heckman, Moon, Pinto, Savelyev & Yavitz, 2010). It is not clear whether the American public is willing to pay for such interventions. Policymakers and legislators want to know the returns on investments in early-childhood development, and whether voters’ perceived net benefits are sufficient to support such investments
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