Compulsory Education and the Benefits of Schooling

Causal estimates of the benefits of increased schooling using US state schooling laws as instruments typically rely on specifications which assume common trends across states in the factors affecting different birth cohorts. Differential changes across states during this period, such as relative sch...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American economic review 2014-06, Vol.104 (6), p.1777-1792
Main Authors: Stephens, Melvin, Yang, Dou-Yan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age
Birth
Censuses
Child labor
Children & youth
College admission
Compulsory education
Confidence interval
Economic impact
Education
Education policy
Educational attainment
Estimation
Labor law
Law schools
Legal education
Legal evidence
Point estimators
School dropouts
Schooling
Shorter Papers
State laws
Statistical analysis
Studies
Trends
Unemployment
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Summary:Causal estimates of the benefits of increased schooling using US state schooling laws as instruments typically rely on specifications which assume common trends across states in the factors affecting different birth cohorts. Differential changes across states during this period, such as relative school quality improvements, suggest that this assumption may fail to hold. Across a number of outcomes including wages, unemployment, and divorce, we find that statistically significant causal estimates become insignificant and, in many instances, wrong-signed when allowing year of birth effects to vary across regions.
ISSN:0002-8282
1944-7981
DOI:10.1257/aer.104.6.1777