New evidence of the relationship between preschool attendance and school performance from Brazil

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of preschool attendance on Portuguese and math test scores in the 5th grade of Brazilian elementary schools. We combine data from the 2010 demographic census and the Saeb 2015 through the definition of representative individuals. This allows us to use the past and contemporary inputs in the framework of the Propensity Score Matching and the quantile treatment effect on the performance of the test. The results show that preschool attendance increases the performance by approximately 0.1 of the standard deviation in both subjects, and this effect is greater in the 90th quantile of the distribution of grades.