Improving preschool provision and encouraging-demand: Evidence from a large-scale construction program

We study the impact of a preschool construction program and of two demand-side interventions in Cambodia. Within this context where other preschools are available, impacts are likely to differ between children who would have been enrolled in a preexisting preschool and those who would have stayed at home, with larger expected gains for the latter. After one year, we measure positive intent-to-treat impacts on an aggregate measure of development and show that the effect on children who would have stayed at home can be bounded (0.14-0.49 SD). Under heavier assumptions, we pinpoint this effect at 0.21 SD, while the effect on children who would have enrolled in another preschool is close to zero. These results are consistent with measures of preschool quality which imply that the newly constructed schools only significantly improved infrastructure, but did not improve the quality of educational processes. After two years, most impacts become insignificant suggesting that the advantage provided by preschool quickly vanished, specifically once children enrolled in primary school.