allows us to examine the impact of 11 months difference in duration of exposure to treatment. The second comparison is non-experimental and compares villages in the last batch to villages that never participated in the project (See Pradhan et al., 2013 for details). This comparison allows us to examine the impact of receiving the project compared to the counterfactual of never having received the project.

The first comparison has the usual advantages of an experimental evaluation using IV methods but has the drawback of looking at impacts in the short term (less than one year). The second comparison has the advantage that pre-intervention baseline data are available, thus making a Difference-in-Differences (DID) analysis feasible and allows for an examination of impacts in the medium term (three years).

Using three waves of longitudinal data, we examine the impact of the project on these two cohorts of children: a cohort of 4-year-olds who were immediately eligible for project-provided playgroups when they began operation in 2009 and a cohort of 1-year-olds who were not immediately age-eligible but became eligible 2 years later when they turned 3 years old. Existing instruments to measure child development in various cognitive and non-cognitive dimensions were adapted for the Indonesian context (A. Hasan et al., 2013) and used to assess these children’s development outcomes.

We find that having the project in the village led to a village-wide average net increase in preschool enrollment rates of 7 – 15 percentage points and an increase in duration of enrollment by 2 – 6 months for the 4- and 1-year-old cohorts respectively. Project-provided playgroups to some extent crowded out existing services, including kindergartens, with greater crowding out for the older cohort. Changes to how playgroups operated may have had implications for which families chose to enroll their children in project-provided services over time. We find that children from the older cohort (the early beneficiaries) were generally poorer and that their development outcomes improved more as a result of the project than those of children in the younger cohort (the later beneficiaries) who were from relatively better-off households.

Specifically, we find that children who lived in project villages had improved language and cognitive development and socio-emotional skills. Among early beneficiaries, project impact is higher for disadvantaged children from poor households with estimated impacts ranging from 0.140 standard deviations to 0.243 standard deviations respectively. It is also higher for children whose parents reported low-parenting skills – ranging from 0.096 standard deviations to 0.198 standard deviations. For later beneficiaries, there is less evidence of differential impact, in part because centers began charging fees – making it more difficult for the poorer children to attend.

We attempt to unpack the channels by which these impacts may have operated by comparing the relative contribution of attending different kinds of preschool services available in the communities (particularly playgroups and kindergartens). For the older cohort, enrollment in project playgroups is associated with improved cognitive skills, while for the younger cohort enrollment in project playgroups is associated with improved cognitive and socio-emotional skills. It would thus appear that the age of a child when they start to attend these services matters.<sup>1</sup> We also explore assessments of center quality through classroom observations using the Early

> 1 The production function analysis reported in this paper does not take the child’s age when they attended a particular service into account.

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