The Effect of School Entrance Age on Educational Outcomes: Evidence Using Multiple Cutoff Dates and Exact Date of Birth

Itay Attar () and Danny Cohen-Zada ()
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Itay Attar: Ben Gurion University
Danny Cohen-Zada: Ben Gurion University

No 10568, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Using Israeli data, we estimate the effect of school entrance age (SEA) on student outcomes. Unlike much of the recent literature, our identification strategy strictly satisfies the monotonicity assumption required for interpreting our estimates as the local average treatment effect (LATE), and also separates the effect of SEA from date of birth effects. We find that delaying school entry by one year increases fifth grade test scores in Hebrew by 0.34 standard deviations and in math by 0.19. Interestingly, while the advantage in Hebrew slightly decreases in eighth grade, in math it almost doubles. We also show that by failing to control for date of birth fixed effects we would have erroneously concluded that the SEA effect on math test scores decreases slightly from fifth grade to eight grade while it actually substantially increases.

Keywords: student outcomes; school entrance age; date of birth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I21 J24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 50 pages
Date: 2017-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published - published in: Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2018, 153, 38-57

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