36 years of civil strife–, the government embarked on an ambitious construction program that increased the number of pre-primary schools from about 5,300 to 11,500 between 1998 and 2005.<sup>3</sup> We combine longitudinal school-level administrative data from 1995-2008 with Population Census data at the community level to estimate the impact of opening a preprimary in a rural community on primary school enrollment and progression by the age of 12. Precise geographic information makes it possible to construct a panel of rural communities that had one primary school during the period of analysis, but no pre-primary school when the construction program began.

Our identification strategy exploits variation over time in the construction of preprimaries across communities and the fact that some cohorts therein had access to a preprimary while others did not. By focusing on rural communities with only one primary school and examining various cohorts over time, we circumvent the potential problem that pre-primary access may affect the composition of students attending primary education. The final selection of beneficiary communities was decided by the central government following an _ad hoc_ procedure with no strict guidelines. Still, we apply trimming and propensity score re-weighting in order to obtain a comparison group with similar preintervention characteristics to the beneficiary communities.

The research design we adopt is closely related to Berlinski et al. (2009), though it differs in a number of ways. First, we exploit variation in access to pre-primaries using a finer level of aggregation. That is, while Berlinski et al. (2009) estimate effects using variation in access to pre-primary education at the municipality level, we estimate effects using variation at the community level. Hence, we count with sharper variation in the variable of interest (a community either has a pre-primary or not). Second, Berlinski et al. (2009) examine effects on test scores of children in third grade of primary school (who are about 8 years old). In contrast, we assess effects on adequate primary school progression for children that are 12 years old. It is well documented that effects on test scores of early childhood interventions tend to fade out during primary education (Almond and Currie, 2011). Therefore, focusing on progression could be a good proxy to gauge whether investments early in life would produce lasting effects on human capital and productivity. Finally, we focus on a substantially poorer context (rural Guatemala as opposed to Argentina), which may be more relevant to low-income countries.<sup>4</sup> We find a positive effect on adequate progression (expected grade given age) of about 2.4 percentage points (from a mean of around 12.3% for the beneficiary group). We

> attendance affects school readiness in a randomized control trial involving a sample of 150 children.

> 3Chamarbagwala and Moran (2011) provide evidence of a strong negative impact of the civil war on the education of the two most disadvantaged groups, namely rural Mayan males and females.

> 4Our empirical strategy is also inspired in Duflo (2001), who examines schooling and labor market consequences of school construction in Indonesia.

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