Compulsory Education and the Benefits of Schooling

Abstract

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. (JEL H75, I21, I28, J24, N31, N32)

Intergenerational transmission of human capital: Is it a one-way street?

“…16 Equation (1) is our first-stage 16 In our empirical analysis, we also check the sensitivity of our results to including countyby-year fixed effects. As recently shown by Stephens and Yang (2014), IV estimates using U.S. compulsory schooling laws often change sign and significance with the addition of region by year controls and are thus not robust across reasonable specifications. Sweden is divided into 20 regional county councils, whose main responsibilities are to provide health care and public transportation.…”

Crime, compulsory schooling laws and education

“…The substantial rise in the prison population was predominantly in the later period, while total property crime has 1 See also the review of the empirical literature on education and youth crime by Rud et al (2013). fallen substantially. On the latter, education levels are higher (in part reflecting longer run trends) and also part of the reason for the focus on the earlier period is that many of the major changes to compulsory schooling laws occurred prior to 1980, which is the variation in the data used to identify the exogenous movement in schooling (see Stephens and Yang, 2014). However we show that there is still substantial variation in these laws over the 1980-2010 period -though we emphasise that the group of students affected by the laws may be very different from those affected by earlier changes (i.e.…”

Birthdays, Schooling, and Crime: Regression-Discontinuity Analysis of School Performance, Delinquency, Dropout, and Crime Initiation

“…Recent quasi-experimental evidence offers support for a causal interpretation of this association: in particular, extensions of the mandatory schooling age in the United States, Great Britain, and Sweden appear to have increased educational attainment and reduced lifetime involvement in criminal activity (Lochner and Moretti 2004;Anderson 2014;Hjalmarsson, Holmlund, and Lindquist 2015;Machin, Marie, and Vujić 2011;and Clay, Lingwall, and Stephens 2012). 1 1 Some published results from the analysis of compulsory-schooling extensions in the United States were recently challenged by Stephens and Yang (2014), who demonstrate that a reasonable modification of the regression specification nullifies claims about wages, unemployment, and divorce. They did not assess the crime literature.…”