Research

Abstract

This paper studies the impacts of school starting age policies on educational attainment, focusing on a unique education reform in China that lowered the age requirement for school entry while keeping the birth date cutoff for entering in the current school year and the required length of schooling constant. Unlike most prior literature, I isolate the effects of starting school at a younger age from the peer effects of being younger than one’s classmates. I provide causal estimates of the long-term effects of school starting age by leveraging the staggered adoption of the reform across provinces and recent advancements in difference-in-differences methodology. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that all children benefit from later school entry, I find that allowing children to start school at a younger age substantially increases enrollment and graduation rates in post-compulsory education.

Main Result

I find exposure to the SSA reform increased high school enrollment by 5.5 percentage points (equivalent to 19.4 percent of the pre-reform average high school enrollment) and increased the high school graduation rate by 5.3 percentage points (19.0 percent of the pre-reform average high school graduation rate).

School-Entry Cutoff and Adolescence Mental Health: Evidence from a South Korean Reform (with Estelle Shin)

The Transition to College: Voices From the Class of 2023 (with Alexandria Hurtt, Michal Kurlaender, and Christina Sun)