In poor countries, a large share of the population is excluded from the education system already at an early age and well before completion of the compulsory schooling cycle. Exclusion from the school system encompasses, in varying combinations, failure to enroll, late entry, intermittent and irregular attendance, high repetition rates and eventually early drop-out (UNESCO, 2005). In this work, we explore whether early exposure to the school system (in the form of pre-primary education) appears as a successful policy option.

In a first paper we study the effect of pre-primary education on children's subsequent school outcomes by exploiting a unique feature of the Uruguayan household survey (ECH) that collects retrospective information on preschool attendance in the context of a rapid expansion in the supply of pre-primary places. Using a within household estimator, we find small gains from preschool attendance at early ages that get magnified as children grow up. By age 15, treated children have accumulated 0.8 extra years of education and are 27 percentage points more likely to be in school compared to their untreated siblings. Instrumental variables estimates that attempt to control for non random selection of siblings into preschool lead to similar results. Pre-primary education appears as a successful and cost-effective policy to prevent early grade failure and its long lasting consequences in low income countries.

In a second paper we provide evidence on the impact of a large-scale construction of pre-primary school facilities in Argentina. We estimate the causal impact of the program on pre-primary school attendance and maternal labor supply. Identification relies on a differences-in-differences strategy where we combine differences across regions in the number of facilities built with differences in exposure across cohorts induced by the timing of the program. We find a sizeable impact of the program on pre-primary school participation among children aged between 3 and 5. In fact, we cannot reject the null hypothesis of a full take-up of newly constructed places. In addition, we find that the implicit childcare subsidy induced by the program appears to increases maternal employment.