A Quebec study says taxpayers get back 40% the cost of daycare in the first year as it frees up a mother to work. Presumably this would pay for the full cost of the programme when factoring private earnings. However, I've seen some papers suggest children in daycare might be more irritable. I have my reservations about the papers, but don't have time to study this issue in detail so am conservatively only giving daycare a 1x externality multiplier, when it may in fact be as high as 4x.
I'm also squeezing in Indian Reserve education here too. Children on Reserves graduate high school at 1/2 the rate of other children. My dumb and coarse method of handling this is to consider IR primary education (grades 1-6) to be a 1x externality. So off IR education I don't consider to be a really high ROI, but on Reserve, 1/2 is.
