Segregation, Peer-Effekte und frühkindliche Kompetenzentwicklung
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
In the early stages of her life cycle, a child acquires skills through inputs of parental investments decisions, schooling, and social interactions. The stock of skills evolves over time and influences future academic performance and labor market outcomes. Therefore, investigating the effects of the inputs is of high importance to policy makers seeking effective measures that improve child development. This project consists of three related empirical studies on the effects of three factors on child development: ethnic composition in kindergarten, the length of attending kindergarten, and immigrants’ choice of the language spoken at home. In all studies, we use administrative records from school entrance examinations for Wuppertal, enriched by socioeconomic data. In the first study, we investigate the effects of linguistic diversity in kindergartens on child development. This diversity has been growing in kindergartens and schools, in recent decades, along with the increase in immigration flows. Yet little is known about the effects of this diversity that may influence early educational attainment through social interaction among children, teaching quality, and cultural assimilation. We construct the measure of linguistic diversity by using the language parents speak to their children at home. The estimated causal effects of linguistic diversity are heterogeneous: There is a small negative but statistically significant effect on the development of German children, which is mainly driven by a detrimental effect on the language skills of German speakers, but there is no effect on non-German speakers. In the second study, we identify the effects of exposure to early education in last year of kindergarten on cognitive and motor skills, exploiting variation in the assigned test date for school entrance examination. We show that our child development index rises by 2.7% of a standard deviation with one additional month of exposure to early education in kindergarten. This rise is largely driven by increases in German language skills, counting skill, and the skill of visual perception. We also find that returns to early education are particularly high for children from disadvantaged families and of immigrant ancestry. Furthermore, the effect of exposure to early education increases with the number of siblings. In the third study, we explore the correlates of immigrants’ choice of language spoken at home, focusing on exposure to parents of the same languages. Our findings suggest that family characteristics are significantly correlated with parental choice, but neighborhood characteristics are not. Looking at each language group separately, we find that Arabic language parents tend to speak Arabic if other families in the neighborhood do the same. In sum, our project has shed light on the effects of education and social interaction in ethnically and linguistically diverse preschools of segregation on early childhood skill development. While we find negative effects of diversity, especially among the German speaking population, these effects are quite small. These effects are counteracted by generally improved language skills among immigrant children through visiting pre-schools. Moreover, we find that the length of exposure to preschool education has heterogeneous effects, depending on the migration status.
