The Macroeconomic Consequences of Early Childhood Development Policies
The Macroeconomic Consequences of Early Childhood Development Policies
复制标题
幼儿发展政策的宏观经济后果
DOI：
10.20955/wp.2018.029
复制
发表时间：
2018
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Diego Daruich
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Diego Daruich
大规模幼儿发展政策的宏观经济后果取决于代际动态、对劳动力和资本市场的一般均衡效应以及为政策融资而增税的无谓损失。为了研究这些政策，本文扩展了一个标准的通用电气异质代理人的代际宏观模型，收入风险和信贷约束，将幼儿投资（父母的时间和金钱），并估计它使用美国的数据。我们通过对一个短期小规模的政府项目进行随机对照试验（RCT）评估来验证该模型，该项目为幼儿投资提供资金，并表明该模型对儿童教育和成人收入的影响与经验证据相似。然后，我们评估了一个永久性的大规模版本的幼儿计划，考虑到通用电气和税收的影响，并发现它产生了10%的福利增加（在消费等价条件下），减少7%的不平等，并增加代际收入流动性30%-大约足够美国达到加拿大或澳大利亚的不平等和流动性水平。福利收益是通过引入相同的幼儿计划作为短期部分均衡政策（类似于RCT）获得的福利收益的两倍。虽然通用电气公司和税收的影响减少了收益的十分之一，在父母的特征分布的长期变化超过补偿这些减少。这种福利收益的关键在于，对儿童的投资不仅提高了她的技能，而且为下一代创造了更好的父母。虽然前几代人收益较少，但每一代人的福利收益都是积极的，并在过渡期间迅速增长。
The macroeconomic consequences of large-scale early childhood development policies depend on intergenerational dynamics, general equilibrium (GE) effects on labor and capital markets, and the deadweight loss of raising taxes to finance the policies. To study these policies, this paper extends a standard GE heterogeneous-agent overlapping-generations macro model with earnings risk and credit constraints to incorporate early childhood investments (parental time and money) and estimates it using US data. We validate the model by performing an RCT evaluation of a short-run small-scale government program that funds early childhood investments and showing that the effects on children’s education and adult income in the model are similar to the empirical evidence. We then evaluate a permanent large-scale version of this early childhood program, taking into account GE and taxation effects, and find that it yields a 10% welfare increase (in consumption equivalence terms), reduces inequality by 7%, and increases intergenerational mobility of income by 30%—approximately enough for the US to achieve Canadian or Australian levels of inequality and mobility. Welfare gains are twice the ones obtained by introducing the same early childhood program as a short-run partial-equilibrium policy—similar to an RCT. Although GE and taxation effects reduce the gains by one-tenth each, the long-run change in the distribution of parental characteristics more than compensates for those reductions. Key to this welfare gain is that investing in a child not only improves her skills but also creates a better parent for the next generation. Although earlier generations gain less, welfare gains are positive for every new generation and grow rapidly during the transition.