TY  - JOUR
AU  - Barua,Rashmi
AU  - Lang,Kevin
TI  - School Entry, Educational Attainment and Quarter of Birth: A Cautionary Tale of LATE
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 15236
PY  - 2009
Y2  - August 2009
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15236
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w15236.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Rashmi Barua
School of Economics
Singapore Management University
90 Stamford Road
Singapore 178903 
E-Mail: rashmibarua@smu.edu.sg

Kevin Lang
Department of Economics
Boston University
270 Bay State Road
Boston, MA  02215
Tel: 617/353-5694
Fax: 617/353-4001
E-Mail: lang@bu.edu
AB  - Partly in response to increased testing and accountability, states and districts have been raising the minimum school entry age, but existing studies show mixed results regarding the effects of entry age. These studies may be severely biased because they violate the monotonicity assumption needed for LATE. We propose an instrument not subject to this bias and show no effect on the educational attainment of children born in the fourth quarter of moving from a December 31 to an earlier cutoff. We then estimate a structural model of optimal entry age that reconciles the different IV estimates including ours. We find that one standard instrument is badly biased but that the other diverges from ours because it estimates a different LATE. We also find that an early entry age cutoff that is applied loosely (as in the 1950s) is beneficial but one that is strictly enforced is not.
ER  -