The Effect of a Social Experiment in Education

Costas Meghir and Mårten Palme

No 451, SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics

Abstract: The impact of compulsory schooling laws as well as the abolition of early selection by ability remain important issues in the educational debate. These issues were the focus of a major education reform in Sweden which was implemented in the 60s. The reform was preceded by a ``social experiment'' in which only a proportion of municipalities received the new school system. We use survey data linked with tax records covering 10\%\ of one of the cohorts who were educated during the experimental period, to evaluate the impact of the reform on educational attainment and earnings. We find significant increases in the educational attainment of individuals from poorer backgrounds. We also find that the largest impact on earnings was for higher ability individuals from poorer backgrounds. In addition we estimate the returns to education for those affected by the reform. By exploiting the differential impact of the reform by county we are able, in some cases, to distinguish its direct effect on earnings from the effect it had by increasing the quantity of education. We find that the main source of increased earnings came from increasing educational attainment.

Keywords: Returns to education; LATE; Propesity score matching. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 I28 J24 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 53 pages
Date: 2001-06-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
http://swopec.hhs.se/hastef/papers/hastef0451.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The effect of a social experiment in education (2001)
Working Paper: The effect of a social experiment in education (2001)
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:hhs:hastef:0451

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance from Stockholm School of Economics The Economic Research Institute, Stockholm School of Economics, P.O. Box 6501, 113 83 Stockholm, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Helena Lundin ().