Abstract
ABSTRACTPreschool attendance is widely recognized as a key ingredient for later socioeconomic success, mothers’ labor market participation, and leveling the playing field for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, the empirical evidence for these claims is still relatively scarce, particularly in Europe. Using data from the 2011 Austrian European Union Statistics of Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), we contribute to this literature by studying the effects of having attended preschool for the adult Austrian population. We find strong and positive effects of preschool attendance on later educational attainment, the probability of working full time, hourly wages, and the probability that the mother is in the labor market. Full time workers at the bottom and the top of the distribution benefit less than those in the middle. Women in particular benefit more in terms of years of schooling and the probability of working full time. Other disadvantaged groups (second generation migrants; people with less educated parents) also often benefit more in terms of education and work.
Highlights
Preschool1 is widely discussed as a potential tool to give children the best opportunities for success and to combat socioeconomic inequality
Given that the present study focuses in particular on the impact of preschool attendance on educational attainment, labor force attachment and wages earned, mother’s labor force participation, and wage inequality in Austria, we restrict our review of this literature to studies from other European countries with similar outcome measures
We used a rich data set from Austria to predict the effects of preschool attendance on later socioeconomic outcomes
Summary
Preschool is widely discussed as a potential tool to give children the best opportunities for success and to combat socioeconomic inequality. Dumas and Lefranc (2010) study the effects of reforms which expanded preschool enrollment in France in the 1960s and 70s, finding that an additional year of preschool reduced the probability of needing to repeat a grade later on by two percentage points and increased the probability of graduating from high school by almost three percentage points This result is driven by positive effects found for people from lower- and middleclass backgrounds. While an early analysis found that there was no effect of the implementation of universal preschool on mother’s labor force participation (Fitzpatrick 2010), the same author later used a different estimation technique and could confirm that the implementation of free preschool increases the probability of working of (only) single mothers whose youngest child is preschool age by between 15 and 20 percentage points (Fitzpatrick 2012).
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