Efficient Targeting in Childhood Interventions

68 Pages Posted: 2 Mar 2020

See all articles by Alexander Paul

Alexander Paul

Aarhus University

Dorthe Bleses

Aarhus University

Michael Rosholm

Aarhus University - Department of Economics and Business Economics; IZA Institute of Labor Economics; Amternes og Kommunernes Forskningsinstitut (AKF)

Abstract

Many targeted childhood interventions such as the Perry Preschool Project select eligible children based on a risk score. The variables entering the risk score and their corresponding weights are usually chosen ad hoc and are unlikely to be optimal. This paper develops a simple economic model and exploits Danish administrative data to address the issue of efficient targeting in childhood interventions. We define children to be in need of an intervention if they suffer from an socially undesirable outcome, such as criminal behavior, at around age 30. Because interventions are most effective very early in life, we then test if and to what extent indicators available at birth can predict the emergence of these outcomes.We find fair to good levels of prediction accuracy for many outcomes, especially educational attainment, criminal behavior, placement in foster care as well as combinations of these outcomes. Logistic regressions perform as well as other machine learning methods. A parsimonious set of indicators consisting of sex, parental education and parental income predicts almost as accurately as using the full set of predictors. Finally, we derive optimal weights for the construction of risk scores. Unlike the ad hoc weights used in typical childhood interventions, we find that optimal weights vary with the outcome of interest, differ between father and mother for the same predictor and should be disproportionately large when parents are at the bottom of the education and income distribution.

Keywords: targeting, early childhood intervention, machine learning

JEL Classification: I18, I28, I38

Suggested Citation

Paul, Alexander and Bleses, Dorthe and Rosholm, Michael, Efficient Targeting in Childhood Interventions. IZA Discussion Paper No. 12989, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3546387 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3546387

Dorthe Bleses

Aarhus University

Michael Rosholm

Aarhus University - Department of Economics and Business Economics ( email )

Fuglesangs Allé 4
Aarhus V
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IZA Institute of Labor Economics

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Germany

Amternes og Kommunernes Forskningsinstitut (AKF)

Nyropsgade 37
Copenhagen, DK-1602
Denmark

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