Redshirting, Compulsory Schooling Laws, and Educational Attainment\

Abstract

Redshirting, Compulsory Schooling Laws, and Educational Attainment Dionissi Aliprantis A wide literature uses date of birth as an instrument to study the causal effects of educational attainment. This paper shows how parents delaying their children's initial enrollment in kindergarten, a practice known as redshirting, can make estimates obtained through this identifi cation framework all but impossible to interpret. A latent index model is used to illustrate how the monotonicity assumption in this framework is violated if redshirting decisions are made in a setting of essential heterogeneity. Empirical evidence is presented from the ECLS-K data set that favors this scenario; redshirting is common and heterogeneity in the treatment effect of educational attainment is likely a factor in parents' redshirting decisions.

School Starting Age and The Crime‐Age Profile

“…Yet, in order to estimate the local average treatment effectthe average effect of being old-for-grade for the group of children who would be inclined to increase their school starting age solely because they were born in January and not Decemberwe also require that the monotonicity assumption is satisfied. Aliprantis (2012), Barua and Lang (2012) and Fiorini et al (2013) argue, however, that monotonicity is likely to be violated if the school starting age distribution of children born just after the cut-off date does not stochastically dominate the corresponding distribution for children born just before the cut-off date. In the US example given by Barua and Lang (2012) for children born in the 1950s, children born in the last quarter of the year were on average younger at school start than children born in the first quarter of the year, but the underlying choices were not monotonically related to the cut-off date: while children born in the last quarter of the year were less likely to start school at age 5 compared to children born in the first quarter of the year, they were at the same time less likely to be very young (four years or younger) and more likely to be very old (six years or older).…”

A Test for Exogeneity in the Presence of Nonlinearities

“…Note that monotonicity is often a point of contention in applied work (see Barua andLang [2009], de Chaisemartin [2014], Aliprantis [2012], and Klein [2010]). 7 However, the monotonicity assumption is necessary neither to derive the probability limit of β L IV nor to derive the Wald test presented below.…”

Late Start with Extra Schooling: The Effect of School Entry-Age Increase and the Introduction of Preparatory Year

“…In fact, discussing the policy change, the Queensland Department of Education website states "This means that Queensland children will be starting school at about the same age as children in other states." 19 The practice of "red-shirting"-parents delay child's enrollment if the child is too young for their cohort, could also confound school-entry age effect because it is potentially driven by the heterogeneity in the treatment effect of educational attainment (Aliprantis, 2012;Fiorini et al, 2013). Taylor and Fiorini (2011) document red-shirting practices across Australia and for the policy-change states, less than 2 percent of parents hold back young-for-cohort children from school enrollment (see Table 2).…”