Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/161191 
Year of Publication: 
2017
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 10568
Publisher: 
Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
Using Israeli data, we estimate the effect of school entrance age (SEA) on student outcomes. Unlike much of the recent literature, our identification strategy strictly satisfies the monotonicity assumption required for interpreting our estimates as the local average treatment effect (LATE), and also separates the effect of SEA from date of birth effects. We find that delaying school entry by one year increases fifth grade test scores in Hebrew by 0.34 standard deviations and in math by 0.19. Interestingly, while the advantage in Hebrew slightly decreases in eighth grade, in math it almost doubles. We also show that by failing to control for date of birth fixed effects we would have erroneously concluded that the SEA effect on math test scores decreases slightly from fifth grade to eight grade while it actually substantially increases.
Subjects: 
school entrance age
student outcomes
date of birth
JEL: 
I21
J24
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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