The Impact of early childhood education on mathematics performance: evidence for public elementary school students in the city of Recife

This article sought to measure the effect of early childhood education on the future academic performance of elementary school students, based on a survey carried out by Fundação Joaquim Nabuco in 2013. The methodology used was the propensity score matching with the purpose of comparing students who claim to have attended pre-primary school with a control group, composed of students who started school from the 1st year of elementary school. Specifically, a stratification analysis was done through the quantile treatment effects. The results reveal that attending preschool has a positive impact on performance, being even more effective for children with lower performance. Several econometric techniques were used to circumvent endogeneity problems. Oster’s sensitivity analysis (2019) indicated that there were no problems of omitted variables.