fatvegan

I just found a good paper on the returns to education from 1990. In the US, students who are born earlier in the year are older on average than their peers when they start school. Students have to start primary school at the beginning of the year but a reasonably large proportion stop going to secondary school on their 16th birthday because that's the legal age in most states. So people born in the first quarter of the year have less education on average than people born in other quarters. People born the first quarter also have lower incomes. The authors used that information to calculate the value of the extra education obtained by people born later in the year. They found that an extra year of high school education resulted in a 7% increase in income all else being equal. Normally you might attribute the higher income to other factors but they make a pretty good case that here it's purely due to education.

It's a pretty cool paper. It's called Does Compulsory School Attendance Affect Schooling and Earnings? and written by Joshua Angrist and Alan Krueger who seem good.