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Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Location Room BZ E4.23, Universitätsplatz 1 - Piazza Università, 1, 39100 Bozen-Bolzano

Departments Press and Events

Contact Claudia Resch
SchoolofEconomics@unibz.it

08 Mar 2018 12:30-13:30

Testing the Internal Validity of Compulsory School Reforms as Instrument for Years of.....

Margherita Fort, Università di Bologna

Location Room BZ E4.23, Universitätsplatz 1 - Piazza Università, 1, 39100 Bozen-Bolzano

Departments Press and Events

Contact Claudia Resch
SchoolofEconomics@unibz.it

In the literature that investigates the causal effects of education on outcomes such as health, wages and crime, it is customary to measure education with years of schooling, and identify these effects using the exogenous variation provided by school reforms increasing compulsory education. If the reforms are correlated to changes in school quality, and school quality is an omitted variable, this identification strategy may fail. We develop a new test that uses the information provided by two distinct measures of cognitive skills and show on PIACC and IALS data that the test cannot reject the internal validity of this popular identification strategy.