The Effects of Pre-K on Later Grade Enrollments: Is Pre-K a Welfare Magnet?

Abstract

Economists sometimes argue that a government cannot simultaneously have open borders and strong welfare programs. Yet within America, local school districts often adopt policies that entail significant resource transfers to parents, in spite of ostensibly open school-district borders. One recent example is the introduction of public pre-kindergarten (pre-k) programs. In this paper, we study whether the adoption of a pre-k program leads to an inflow of families to a school district, analogous to the “magnet hypothesis” where welfare programs draw immigrants into a state or nation. To shed light on this question, we study a national panel of public school districts in the Common Core of Data from 1986 through 2015 and use a difference-in-differences design to estimate the relationship between adopting a pre-k program and district kindergarten and first grade enrollments a year or two later, respectively. We find that adopting a pre-k program is associated with a statistically significant increase in a district's first grade enrollments two years later by between 1% and 1.5%. Falsification tests suggest this is a causal effect. Similar effects are found on kindergarten enrollments one year later, and at the school-level for schools that adopt pre-k programs and that already had attached kindergartens and first grades. However, we find relatively weak evidence that the adoption of pre-k programs affects district minority shares. Thus, this particular welfare program may not necessarily attract disadvantaged families. Implications for education and immigration policy are discussed.