School Entry, Educational Attainment and Quarter of Birth: A Cautionary Tale of LATE

Abstract

Partly in response to increased testing and accountability, states and districts have been raising the minimum school entry age, but existing studies show mixed results regarding the effects of entry age. These studies may be severely biased because they violate the monotonicity assumption needed for LATE. We propose an instrument not subject to this bias and show no effect on the educational attainment of children born in the fourth quarter of moving from a December 31 to an earlier cutoff. We then estimate a structural model of optimal entry age that reconciles the different IV estimates including ours. We find that one standard instrument is badly biased but that the other diverges from ours because it estimates a different LATE. We also find that an early entry age cutoff that is applied loosely (as in the 1950s) is beneficial but one that is strictly enforced is not.

No Pass No Drive: Education and Allocation of Time

“…If school entry age laws changed around the same time as NPND laws, our results would not correctly capture the e¤ect of NPND laws. This is even more relevant because the literature …nds that older children tend to perform better in school and complete more years of schooling (Barua and Lang, 2010).…”

“…In 2010, the state suspended 5,389 students'licenses for truancy, and sent warnings to another 24,090 students with learner's permit who were at risk for a delay in getting their license. 4 The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we study the e¤ect of a negative incentive policy on long run education outcomes.…”

No Pass No Drive: Education and Allocation of Time

“…In a recent survey of high school dropouts, 38 percent of respondents cited "too much freedom and too many distractions"as a factor in their decision to drop out from high school. 3 In the same survey, 68 percent felt that their respective schools should have tried to stop students from skipping classes. This suggests that a policy that addresses both school attendance requirements and out of school distractions might be an e¤ective way to keep students in school.…”

Intertemporal Substitution in Maternal Labor Supply: Evidence Using State School Entrance Age Laws

“…Unlike previous research, this is the …rst study that exploits the state laws and month of birth variation to look at long run maternal labor market outcomes. In addition, as discussed extensively in Barua and Lang (2010), if there is heterogeneity in treatment e¤ects, the instrument used here identi…es (under some reasonable assumptions) the Local Average Treatment E¤ect (LATE) i.e. the labor supply e¤ect on those women who decide to delay school entry only because the law constrains them to do so.…”

“…Second, I allow for the fact that some mothers may bene…t from delaying school enrollment of their children while others may be hurt by it. The estimation strategy provides consistent estimates of the Local Average Treatment E¤ect (LATE) of entrance age on outcomes even if there is heterogeneity in the entrance age e¤ect (Barua and Lang, 2010). This paper also contributes to the literature that uses natural experiments and di¤erences-in-di¤erences methods to study intertemporal labor supply.…”