Compulsory Education and the Benefits of Schooling

Abstract

Causal estimates of the benefits of increased schooling using U.S. 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.

The Anti‐Democrat Diploma: How High School Education Decreases Support for the Democratic Party

“…However, state‐specific cohort trends provide a general check against the possibility that reforms coincide with linear processes that differ across states, such as changes in school quality, that could also affect political behavior. Stephens and Yang () demonstrate the importance of including such trends. Moreover, SI Table shows that changes in dropout ages are not predicted by changes in state‐level political control.…”

A machine learning approach to improving occupational income scores

“…6 Typically, these papers analyze historical Census data for which income or wage data are not available and interpret occupational income score as a proxy for income. Some of the papers, however, present occupational income score along with wage/income data as an alternative measure of socioeconomic status (see Stephens and Yang (2014) or Chin (2005)). Some papers attempt to reduce the bias by limiting the sample to a particular demographic group, typically white males (see Bleakley (2010)).…”

“…Cook et al (2014) Distinctively black names and socioeconomic status. No No Stephens and Yang (2014) Sensitivity of prior estimates for the returns to schooling to region-specific birth year effects.…”

Education and adult health: Is there a causal effect?

“…To tackle this problem, we exploit the exogenous variation of schooling induced by changes in CSL that raised school 11 As Lochner (2011) claims, without the inclusion of these trends secular improvements in health may be incorrectly attributed to school reforms, biasing the results. In addition, we know from Stephens and Yang (2014) that it is crucial that these time trends are country-specific. 12 leaving age.…”