Testing the Internal Validity of Compulsory School Reforms as Instrument for Years of Schooling

Giorgio Brunello, Margherita Fort, Guglielmo Weber and Christoph Weiss

Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna

Abstract: In the large empirical literature that investigates the causal effects of education on outcomes such as health, wages and crime, it is customary to measure education with years of schooling, and to identify these effects using the exogenous variation provided by school reforms increasing compulsory education and minimum school leaving age. If these reforms are correlated to changes in school quality, and school quality is an omitted variable, this identification strategy may fail. We test whether this is the case by using the information provided by two distinct test scores on mathematics and reading and find that we cannot reject the internal validity of this popular identification strategy.

JEL-codes: C26 I2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://amsacta.unibo.it/3872/1/WP911.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Testing the Internal Validity of Compulsory School Reforms as Instrument for Years of Schooling (2013)
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:bol:bodewp:wp911

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna ().