Schooling and the AFQT: Evidence from School Entry Laws
نویسندگان
چکیده
Elizabeth U. Cascio Ethan G. Lewis Abstract: How much can late schooling investments close racial and ethnic skill gaps? We investigate this question by exploiting the large differences in completed schooling that arise among teenagers with birthdays near school entry cutoff dates. We estimate that an additional year of high school raises the AFQT scores of minorities in the NLSY 79 by 0.31 to 0.32 standard deviations. These estimates imply that closing existing racial and ethnic gaps in schooling could close skill gaps by between 25 and 50 percent. Our approach also uncovers a significant direct effect of season of birth on test scores, suggesting that previous estimates using season of birth as an instrument for schooling are biased. Forthcoming in the Journal of Human Resources, Spring 2006, 41(2)
منابع مشابه
The Lasting Health Impact of Leaving School in a Bad Economy: Britons in the 1970s Recession.
This paper investigates whether leaving school in a bad economy deteriorates health in the long run. It focuses on low-educated individuals in England and Wales who entered the labour market immediately after the 1973 oil crisis. Our identification strategy relies on the comparison of individuals who left school at the compulsory age, were born in the same year and had a similar quantity of edu...
متن کاملSchooling Laws, School Quality, and the Returns to Schooling∗
Educational attainment increased sharply during the first part of the 20th century as compulsory schooling laws became more stringent and school quality greatly improved. Since prior research finds that school quality gains contributed to increased education levels during this period, causal estimates of the returns to schooling which use schooling laws as instruments but ignore the contemporan...
متن کاملThe Effect of Female Education on Fertility and Infant Health: Evidence from School Entry Policies Using Exact Date of Birth.
This paper uses age-at-school-entry policies to identify the effect of female education on fertility and infant health. We focus on sharp contrasts in schooling, fertility, and infant health between women born just before and after the school entry date. School entry policies affect female education and the quality of a woman's mate and have generally small, but possibly heterogeneous, effects ...
متن کاملSubjective Discount Rates, Intergenerational Transfers and the Return to Schooling
Subjective Discount Rates, Intergenerational Transfers and the Return to Schooling Using a dynamic programming model of schooling decisions, we investigate the relationship between subjective discount rates and the labor market ability (the discount rate bias) on a panel taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Given household human capital and Armed Forces Qualification tes...
متن کاملIZA Discussion Paper No. 60
Subjective Discount Rates, Intergenerational Transfers and the Return to Schooling Using a dynamic programming model of schooling decisions, we investigate the relationship between subjective discount rates and the labor market ability (the discount rate bias) on a panel taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Given household human capital and Armed Forces Qualification tes...
متن کامل