GIFT OF TIME AND FAMILY GIFT: THE EFFECT OF EARLY SCHOOL ENTRY ON PUPILS PERFORMANCE

Patrizia Ordine (), Giuseppe Rose and Daniela Sposato ()
Additional contact information
Daniela Sposato: Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza, Università della Calabria

No 201408, Working Papers from Università della Calabria, Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza "Giovanni Anania" - DESF

Abstract: This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the effect of early school entry on educational outcomes using standardized test score data on Italian pupils. The empirical procedure is designed to disentangle the effect of regular entry (Gift of Time) from possible unobserved confounding factors (Family Gift) affecting both enrollment decision and schooling outcome. We tackle the issue of selection on unobservables by using a Regression Discontinuity Design so that exogenous age thresholds are used to compare children with similar age but different educational choices. Our estimates suggest that anticipated school entry may generate severe penalties in test scores which persist during primary school. Our fi?ndings have policy implications for parents, which struggle with the question of whether they should send their children to school as soon as they are eligible, and for governments, which can change cutoff birth date for ?first enrollment into school.

Keywords: Age at school entry; primary school; standardized test scores (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H52 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2014-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecostat.unical.it/RePEc/WorkingPapers/WP08_2014.pdf First version, 2014-07 (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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:clb:wpaper:201408

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Università della Calabria, Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza "Giovanni Anania" - DESF Università della Calabria, Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza "Giovanni Anania", Ponte Pietro Bucci, Cubo 0/C, I-87036 Arcavacata di Rende, CS, Italy. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Giovanni Dodero ().