The Life Cycle Effects of School Entrance Age on Educational and Economic Outcomes

Project Details

Description

Using Israeli data, Dr. Cohen-Zada and his PhD student, Itay Attar, are estimating the life-cycle effects of entrance age on educational and economic outcomes. Unlike much of the recent literature, they exploit a novel identification strategy that relies on exogenous variation in cutoff dates across years while holding the date of birth constant. This is made possible owing to the previous school entry rule in Israel, which determined that the school entry cutoff date occurs always on the same Jewish calendar date  the first day of the fourth Jewish month of Tevet. Thus, since the Jewish lunar year is about eleven days shorter than the solar cycle, in different years this same Jewish cutoff date is mechanically converted into different Gregorian cutoff dates that are spread throughout December. As a result, children born on the same date of the year face a different entrance cutoff date, which implies that some of them are situated before the relevant cutoff and are allowed to enter school in the current year, while others are situated after it and have to wait until the following year. This unique setting allows the researchers to cleanly disentangle the effect of entrance age from date of birth effects. This strategy is used to analyze the effect of entrance age on educational attainment, test scores in adulthood (ages 18-40), taking a college entry exam, being accepted to a college/university, achieving a bachelor's degree, and income earned in the labor market. ,

StatusActive
Effective start/end date1/01/18 → …

Funding

  • Spencer Foundation

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