Child care center quality and early child development

A unique dataset on applications and admissions to child care centers allow us to explore parental preferences for child care center characteristics. We proceed to study how staff qualifications, experience and sickness absence, as well as the proportion of male and immigrant staff, explain the cognitive development of children randomly allocated to child care centers contingent on observable characteristics. Children who receive their first offer of child care enrollment from a center with a high share of male staff, perform better on language tests in their early school years. If the sickness absence is high in the center, child test scores are lower in both language and mathematics.