The effect of instructional time reduction on educational attainment: Evidence from the Japanese curriculum standards revision

Nobuyoshi Kikuchi

Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, 2014, vol. 32, issue C, 17-41

Abstract: This paper investigates how the reduction of instructional time affects educational attainment, using the revision of the Japanese curriculum standards in 1981 as a quasi-experiment. Although instructional time is considered an important input for the education production function, there is limited consensus on its causal effect on later outcomes. This is because of the difficulty of estimation without relying on cross-country variation or on before-and-after comparison. By using a feature of the centralised Japanese public educational system, this paper estimates the effect of the revision in junior high schools as a difference-in-differences estimator. The revision is unique because it reduces the total school teaching hours by 445, which corresponds to about 13% of the previous standards, leaving the length of school weeks or the educational system unchanged. The main results show that the revision decreases schooling by about 0.5years and the probability to enrol in high school by about 3–4% for women. These results are statistically significant and robust to controlling for the birth cohort or regional effects.

Keywords: Instructional time; Curriculum; Compulsory schooling; Educational policy; Difference-in-differences; Japan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889158314000021
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jjieco:v:32:y:2014:i:c:p:17-41

DOI: 10.1016/j.jjie.2014.01.001

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Japanese and International Economies is currently edited by Takeo Hoshi

More articles in Journal of the Japanese and International Economies from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().