Were Compulsory Attendance and Child Labor Laws Effective? An Analysis from 1915 to 1939
Abstract
Secondary schooling experienced incredible growth in the first 40 years of the 20th Century. Was legislation on compulsory attendance and child labor responsible for this growth? This paper analyzes a detailed set of laws, examining their effect on the entire distribution of education. It also looks at the factors that explain changes in the laws. Using individual data from the 1960 census, I estimate the effect of these laws on educational achievement for individuals who were 14 years old between 1915 and 1939. The results show that legally requiring a child to attend school for one more year, either by increasing the age required to obtain a work permit or by lowering the entrance age, increased educational attainment by about 5%. Interestingly the effect was similar for white males and females, but there was no effect for blacks. Continuation school laws, which required working children to attend school on a part time basis, were effective for white males only. I also find that the laws increased the education only of those in the lower percentiles of the distribution of education. This result is consistent with what theory predicts if the laws were indeed enforced. By increasing the education of the lower tail, the laws contributed to the decrease in educational inequality, perhaps by as much as 15%. States with more wealth and a higher percentage of immigrants were more likely to pass more stringent laws, and states with higher percentage of blacks were less likely to do so. Importantly, the results also suggest that the laws were not endogenous during this period, in the sense that compulsory attendance and child labor laws caused education to increase, not vice-versa.Download Info
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. 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.Bibliographic Info
Paper provided by Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Center for Health and Wellbeing. in its series Working Papers with number 273.Length:
Date of creation: Apr 2001
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:pri:cheawb:273
Contact details of provider:
Postal: Robertson Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544-1013
Phone: (609) 258-4800
Web page: http://weblamp.princeton.edu/chw/index.html
More information through EDIRC
Related research
Keywords:References
No references listed on IDEASYou can help add them by filling out this form.
Citations
Lists
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Statistics
Access and download statisticsCorrections
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pri:cheawb:273For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (David Long).
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.