The Human Capital Dynamic Linkage in Early Childhood Development: How Pre-Kindergarten Experience Affects Schooling Outcomes

This paper uses a multi-stage education model to identify the human capital dynamic linkage in early childhood development, namely how chil-dren’s pre-kindergarten human capital levels affect their schooling efficiency and outcomes. The human capital dynamic linkage is significantly positive, and estimation without controlling for endogeneity is downward biased. The human capital dynamic linkage differs across subject areas, and ex-hibits complementariy with other family educational inputs. Conventional program evaluation ignoring this dynamic linkage may have wrong policy implications. 1 1