CANCELLED: Ludovica Gambaro (DIW Berlin – German Institute for Economic Research)

“Early childhood care services and refugee children: Differences in attendance and consequences for integration“

Abstract:
Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is considered an important channel for the social integration of refugee families who recently arrived in Germany (between 2013 and 2016). In this paper, we first examine refugee children’s attendance in ECEC and investigate how patterns vary depending on individual and family characteristics, and institutional determinants of the location of residence. We then evaluate the impact of children’s ECEC attendance on the social integration of their parents. Our results show a substantial effect of ECEC attendance on the social integration of mothers. To estimate the causal effect, we adopt an instrumental variable approach exploiting the county-level variation in ECEC attendance rates. In addition, we control for a rich set of characteristics for refugee’s human capital, pre-migration history, and current situation in Germany, as well as for economic and institutional characteristics of the location of residence.