The Impact of School Entry Age on Student Achievement: Evidence from Nebraska

Using administrative data with exact date of birth from the Nebraska Department of Education, I assess the impact of waiting an additional year to start kindergarten on socio-economic achievement gap. Exploiting a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, I find a positive effect of waiting on test scores. However, the positive impact diminishes over time, and the diminishing effect is more pronounced for children from disadvantaged households. This suggests that the decision to delay kindergarten entry may worsen the socioeconomic achievement gap. However, using an exogenous change in the kindergarten entry policy in Nebraska, I find no impact of moving the kindergarten cutoff earlier on the achievement gap. A reduction in the practice of redshirting might drive that result. 

Maternal Labor Supply and Change in Kindergarten Cutoff

This paper identifies the impact of moving the kindergarten cutoff earlier on maternal labor market outcomes. I exploit the variation across states and over time in the kindergarten cutoff to evaluate the potential impact on mothers with a five-year-old child. Using data from the American Community Survey (ACS), I apply a staggered difference-in-difference model to assess the change in mothers’ labor market outcomes explained by the fall in enrollment in states that changed the kindergarten cutoff. I find the change in the cutoff to decrease the employment of single mothers without any additional younger children. For other groups of mothers, I could not find any significant impact.

English Proficiency and Occupational Sorting of U.S. Childhood Immigrants

Does English proficiency affect the labor market outcomes of US childhood immigrants? Do the outcomes vary across the gender and life-cycle? To explore these questions, I use Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) USA, the individual level public database. I explore how the English proficiency level of US childhood immigrants influences their preferences for jobs. Due to the concern for potential endogeneity of English proficiency, I have undertaken instrumental variable approach based on the critical period hypothesis of language acquisition. Following the IV approach adopted by previous literature, I find that an increase in English proficiency makes the immigrants less likely to choose routine intensive jobs and more likely to choose non-routine analytic or social skill-intensive jobs. The results exhibit some degree of heterogeneity by gender and age-groups, especially up to 40.