Here are links to some of the interesting social science research we encountered during the week:

Yesterday, we looked at some of the lessons from Great Britain's recent push to expand access to preschool education. Today, we examine the preschool experience in France, where almost all children are enrolled in preschool at the age of three. First established in 1882, preschool -- or ecole maternelle -- has a long history in France, but the universal access that currently exists largely stems from reforms adopted in the 1960s and 1970s. During this period, according to Christelle Dumas and Arnaud LeFranc, enrollment rates for three-year-olds increased from around 35 percent to more than 90 percent. Preschool conditions in France are similar to primary education -- instructors generally receive the same level of training as primary school teachers, and children receive a substantial amount of instruction (typically six hours per day, four days a week, and thirty-six weeks per year).

In their chapter in From Parents to Children: The Intergenerational Transmission of Advantage, Dumas and LeFranc exploited this rapid rise in enrollment to assess the impact of preschool education on students' educational and labor market outcomes. Their study is important because there are relatively few assessments of universal access preschool programs; most research, at least in the United States, has focused on targeted experiments such as the Perry program. Dumas and LeFranc offer a generally positive assessment: they conclude that one additional year of French preschool reduced the probability of repeating first grade, and that attending preschool for two and three years, rather than one year, increased participants’ monthly wages by 3.2 percent and 3.6 percent respectively when they entered the labor market. Here is their summary of their main findings:

We find evidence that preschool has significant and lasting positive effects and helps children succeed in school and secure higher wages in the labor market. The effects on school performance are observed at different ages and through a variety of outcomes (number of repetitions, test scores, diplomas). Identification of long-lasting effects contradicts the results of Magnuson and her colleagues (2007) for the United States. More precisely, preschool does not provide a one-shot advantage but, rather, makes children more likely to succeed at each step of their schooling career and in the labor market. This suggests that this early intervention manages to affect more than just the cognitive level of the children. Unfortunately, the data do not allow us to identify what changes for the children who have attended preschool. Are they more able to concentrate? Have they developed social skills? Do they assimilate rules more easily? The answer is probably a mix of these mechanisms, but is a matter for future research to explore.

In May 1997, the New Labour government in Britain announced plans to provide universal and free preschool for all four-year-olds within two years. The new entitlement, expanded to include three-year-olds in 2004, dramatically raised preschool enrollment rates (previously among the lowest in Europe) and narrowed gaps in enrollment between richer and poorer families. In her book, Britain's War on Poverty, Jane Waldfogel reviews Britain's preschool experiment and suggests lessons for the United States, an instructive exercise as President Obama now begins his own push to expand access to preschool education. An excerpt from the Waldfogel's book is published below:

A large body of evidence documents that high-quality preschool programs increase children’s school readiness, with particularly large effects for the most-disadvantaged children. Hence, expanding quality preschool programs can raise overall school readiness as well as close gaps between low-income children and their more-affluent peers. However, not all preschool programs are alike; the evidence suggests that higher-quality programs yield larger gains. Research in Britain, for example, strongly suggests that children learn more in preschool when they are in school- or center-based settings (as opposed to less formal types of child care settings) and when those programs are led by staff who have a university degree.

Yet, as I highlighted in my discussion of the reforms, some of the programs that British three- and four-year-olds attend are not formal school- or center-based programs, and relatively few are led by university-educated staff. In this regard, the British experience offers a cautionary note for the United States, which, like Britain, has a heavily privatized child care system and one in which the type and quality of provision is highly variable. If the United States follows the British example and provides subsidies that parents can take to a wide range of child care programs, the quality of that provision will vary widely, and the gains that have been seen from the best-quality preschool programs will not be realized. Fortunately, there are many other models to draw on, including the universal pre-kindergarten programs in the United States itself, which are now operating in several states, with programs located in the public schools or in approved preschool settings that meet standards set by the public schools. These universal pre-kindergarten programs have a strong track record of promoting children’s school readiness and have been well received by parents, who view them as part of the public education system. Thus my recommendation: The United States should draw inspiration from how quickly and decisively Britain moved to universal preschool provision, but should draw on the best evidence on U.S. preschool and pre-kindergarten programs in deciding what type of provision to support.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama voiced support for raising the federal minimum wage, a deeply controversial move that has often divided economists and policymakers. Conventional economic theory suggests that raising the minimum wage will lead firms to cut production costs and jobs. Over the past decade or so, the Russell Sage Foundation has funded several studies that assessed the actual impact of minimum wage increases in cities and states across the country. Links are included below:

• Schmitt, John and David Rosnick. 2011. "The Wage and Employment Impact of Minimum‐Wage Laws in Three Cities," Center for Economic Policy and Research.

This report analyzes the wage and employment effects of the first three city-specific minimum wages in the United States –San Francisco (2004), Santa Fe (2004), and Washington, DC (1993). The authors use data from a virtual census of employment in each of the three cities, surrounding suburbs, and nearby metropolitan areas, to estimate the impact of minimum-wage laws on wages and employment in fast food restaurants, food services, retail trade, and other low-wage and small establishments.

• Powers, Elizabeth T. 2009. "The Impact of Minimum-Wage Increases: Evidence from Fast-Food Establishments in Illinois and Indiana," Journal of Labor Research Vol. 30 (4), pp. 365-394. (Gated)

Fast-food establishments in Illinois and Indiana were surveyed during a period of state-mandated minimum-wage increases in Illinois. While entry-level wages of Illinois establishments rose substantially in response to the mandated increases, there is little evidence that Illinois establishments ameliorated wage increases by delaying scheduled raises or reducing fringe benefit offerings. There is little evidence of ‘labor-labor’ substitution in favor of women, better educated, or teenaged workers, or increased worker tenure at the new wage, but weak evidence of increased food prices. In contrast, there are large declines in part-time positions and workers’ hours in Illinois relative to Indiana. Aggregate figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics support relative declines in total fast-food employment in ‘downstate’ Illinois counties, as hypothesized. However, establishments’ responses do not appear proportionate to the strength of the minimum wage change.

Here are links to some of the interesting social science research we encountered during the week:

Between 2007 and 2010, sociologists Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks conducted three nationally representative surveys to systematically examine Americans' attitudes toward counterterrorism policies. Their data, published in our new book, Whose Rights? Counterterrorism and the Dark Side of American Public Opinion, offer an interesting empirical perspective on American attitudes at a time when the debate over the use of drones, extrajudicial killings and extraordinary rendition has re-emerged. Here is an excerpt from the volume:

Figure 3.1 presents our analysis of these data, and symbols indicate the mean level of support for a specific counterterrorism policy or practice. [The survey's] counterterrorism items have a range of 0 through 1, higher scores indicating greater support. Of the ten policies and practices at hand, it is NSA surveillance of American citizens and suspected terrorists that elicits the highest level of support. With a score of 0.76, the NSA surveillance item’s score is well above levels of support for the next three counterterrorism items, all of which cluster together: airport security (0.67), the Patriot Act (0.66), and the Military Commissions Act (0.65). Next is assassination, where the targeting of “individuals suspected of being al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders” receives a score of 0.60.

These first five counterterrorism items show what amounts to a fair amount of support. All scores are well above the 0.50 scale midpoint. The right panel of figure 3.1 presents data for the remaining five items. The rights violation item leads the way, 0.57 indicating that respondents’ average opinion is shaded toward agreement with the position of taking “all steps necessary to prevent additional acts of terrorism.” Not far behind are opinions on detention, the mean for which is 0.54. In the 2010 SAPA survey, the detention and ethnic profiling items have the same item score of 0.54. The waterboarding item is next with a score of 0.45. With an even lower score of 0.34, the practice of torture easily elicits the highest level of public opposition. Given that waterboarding is best understood as a subset of torture, the contrast between opinions on these two counterterrorism practices merits a note in passing because it anticipates the cognitively induced framing effects we probe more systematically in chapters 4 through 6.