This paper tests the hypothesis that compulsory school attendance laws, which typically require school attendance until a specified birthday, induce a relationship between the years of schooling and age at school entry. Variation in school start age created by children's date of birth provides a natural experiment for estimation of the effect of age at school entry. Because no large data set contains information on both age at school entry and educational attainment, we use an Instrumental Variables (IV) estimator with data derived from the 1960 and 1980 Censuses to test the age-at-entry/compulsory schooling model. In most IV applications, the two covariance matrices that form the estimator are constructed from the same sample. We use a method of moments framework to discuss IV estimators that combine moments from different data sets. In our application, quarter of birth dummies are the instrumental variables used to link the 1960 Census, from which age at school entry can be derived for one cohort of students, to the 1980 Census, which contains educational attainment for the same cohort of students. The results suggest that roughly 10 percent of students were constrained to stay in school by compulsory schooling laws.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
3571.
Length: Date of creation: Dec 1990 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3571
Note: LS Contact details of provider: Postal: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. Phone: 617-868-3900 Email: Web page: http://www.nber.org More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Micklewright, John, 1989.
"Choice at Sixteen,"
Economica,
London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 56(221), pages 25-39, February.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.
Did you know? You can include your works in the database easily by uploading them on the Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA) if you do not have access to an institutional RePEc archive.