Compulsory Schooling and the Returns to Education: A Re-examination

Sophie van Huellen () and Duo Qin ()
Additional contact information
Sophie van Huellen: Department of Economics, SOAS, University of London, UK

No 199, Working Papers from Department of Economics, SOAS, University of London, UK

Abstract: We re-examine the effect of compulsory school law on education in the US pioneered by Angrist and Krueger (1991). We show that the standard instrumental variable approach of the education variable not only yields empirically inconsistent estimates, but is conceptually confused. The confusion arises from the rejection of the key causal variable as a valid conditional variable. By route of a causally explicit model design we are able to identify the circumstances under which the formerly rejected variable can yield valid inference values. Our investigation demonstrates the importance of building data-consistent models over estimator choice in successful research designs.

Keywords: instrumental variables; randomisation; research design; returns to education; treatment effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C26 C52 H75 I21 I26 J24 N32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-lma
Date: 2016-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.soas.ac.uk/economics/research/workingpapers/file115191.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:soa:wpaper:199

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, SOAS, University of London, UK Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Duo QIN (). This e-mail address is bad, please contact .