The Effects of Age-at-School Entry: Insights from Evidence and Methods (Joint with Mariagrazia Cavallo, Elizabeth Dhuey and Luca Fumarco) 

R&R Journal of Economic Literature

This article reviews the growing literature on age at school entry (ASE) and its effects across the life course. ASE influences a wide range of outcomes, including education, labor market performance, health, social relationships, and family formation. We synthesize the evidence using a conceptual framework that distinguishes four empirically intertwined ASE components: starting age, relative age, age at outcome measurement, and time in school. While ASE effects are often large and persistent, many studies estimate bundled impacts without isolating specific components or directly measuring mechanisms. We highlight six channels through which ASE operates and explain how different research designs capture different combinations of these components. Methodological challenges, institutional heterogeneity, and behavioral responses complicate interpretation. We conclude by identifying critical gaps, particularly around relative age and long-run outcomes, and offer directions for future research and policy design.

Long-term effects of grade retention  

R&R The Economic Journal

Grade retention offers students a chance to catch up with unmastered material but also leads to less labor-market experience by delaying graduation and labor-market entry. This is the first paper to quantify this trade-off, using an exit exam cutoff of Dutch academic secondary schools, where failing implies grade retention. I find no impact of retaining on final educational attainment, although retained students are later to graduate. Grade retention does lead to annual earnings loss at age 28 of 3000 euro (8.5%) due to reduced labor-market experience. Overall, grade retention is of no benefit for students around the cutoff. 

Long-Term Effects of School-Starting-Age Rules

with Hessel Oosterbeek and Bas van der Klaauw, Economics of Education Review, 84, 2021, 102144

To study the long-term effects of school-starting-age rules in a setting with early ability tracking, we exploit the birth month threshold used in the Netherlands. We find that students born just after the threshold perform better at the end of primary school than students born just before it. This translates into increased placement in high ability tracks in secondary education. This difference diminishes gradually during subsequent stages, and we find no effect on the highest attained educational level. Those born just before the threshold enter the labor market somewhat younger and therefore have more labor market experience and higher earnings at any given age until 40. We conclude that early ability tracking does not harm long-term outcomes of children who were, for exogenous reasons, placed in a lower track.

Work in progress

• Integrated vs. Separated Schooling for Refugee Children: Long-Term Effects on Education and Assimilation  (Joint with Caterina Pavese and Ludger Woessmann) 

• Inequality of educational access: test or teacher? Evidence from a policy reform
  
  I study the inequality of access to ability tracks in secondary schools in the Netherlands by exploiting a policy reform that gives more weight to the recommendation of the teacher and less weight to students’ test scores on the nationwide exit test from primary school. Using a difference-in-differences design, I find that given equal ability, the reform reduced the placements gap between students from high- and low-income families and so decreased the inequality of access. I control for students' ability using their older sibling’s pre-reform test scores, a measure unconfounded by the reform’s change in incentives. Using this ability proxy also ensures common pre-trends in the main outcome variables. Controlling for students’ own test scores instead, a common method in the literature, leads to erroneous conclusions.

• Grade Retention, with Kendall Kennedy and Jiee Zhong. Invited for inclusion in Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics, ed. Klaus F. Zimmermann. (Submitted)