The Effect of Age at School Entry on Educational Attainment: An Application of Instrumental Variables with Moments from Two Samples
Year: 1990
Type: report
Abstract: We present a model in which compulsory school attendance laws, which typically require school attendance until a specified birthday, induce a relationship between years of schooling and age at school entry. Variation in school starting age created by children's dates of birth provides a natural experiment for estimating 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 estimate and 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 coh...
DOI: 10.3386/w3571
Authors: Joshua Angrist, Alan Krueger
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3125813942