TY - RPRT T1 - Quantifying the life-cycle benefits of a prototypical early childhood program Y1 - 2017 A1 - Garcia, Jorge Luis A1 - Heckman, James J. A1 - Leaf, Duncan Ermini A1 - Prados, María José KW - Childhood adversity KW - Lifecycles AB - This paper quantifies the experimentally evaluated life-cycle benefits of a widely implemented early childhood program targeting disadvantaged families. We join experimental data with non-experimental data using economic models to forecast its life-cycle benefits. Our baseline estimate of the internal rate of return (benefit/cost ratio) is 13.7% (7.3). We conduct extensive sensitivity analyses to account for model estimation error, forecasting error, and judgments made about the empirical magnitudes of non-market benefits. We examine the performance of widely used, ad hoc estimates of long-term benefit/cost ratios based on short-term measures of childhood test scores and find them wanting. JF - NBER Working Paper Series PB - National Bureau of Economic Research CY - Cambridge, MA UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w23479.pdf ER -