Suburban Legend: School Cutoff Dates and the Timing of Births

Dickert‐Conlin, Stacy; Elder, Todd E.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1342520

Cited by 20 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 19 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…16 Dickert-Conlin and Elder (2010) provide evidence that parents with different characteristics do not systematically time childbirth around school entry cutoff dates. Buckles and Hungerman (2013) provide a counter example; however, they consider seasonality across the full year rather than adjacent months comparison.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

School Starting Age and Cognitive Development

Dhuey

Figlio

Karbownik³

et al. 2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We present evidence of a positive relationship between school starting age and children's cognitive development from age 6 to 15 using a regression discontinuity design and large-scale population-level birth and school data from the state of Florida. We estimate effects of being relatively old for grade (being born in September versus August) that are remarkably stablealways just around 0.2 SD difference in test scores -across a wide range of heterogeneous groups, based on maternal education, poverty at birth, race/ethnicity, birth weight, gestational age, and school quality. While the September-August difference in kindergarten readiness is dramatically different by subgroup, by the time students take their first exams, the heterogeneity in estimated effects effectively disappears. We document substantial variation in compensatory behaviors targeted towards young for grade children. While the more affluent families tend to redshirt their children, young for grade children from less affluent families are more likely to be retained in grades prior to testing. School district practices regarding retention and redshirting are correlated with improved outcomes for the groups less likely to use those remediation approaches (i.e., retention in the case of more-affluent families and redshirting in the case of less-affluent families.) We also study college and juvenile detention outcomes using administrative data from a large Florida school district, and show that being an older age at school entry increases children's college attainment and reduces the likelihood of being incarcerated for juvenile crime.

show abstract

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

School Starting Age and Cognitive Development

Dhuey

Figlio

Karbownik³

et al. 2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Children of lower income parents may also have lower cognitive and non-cognitive skills. Dickert-Conlin & Elder (2010) directly test the validity of the exogeneity assumption by investigating whether there is a discontinuity in the number of births at the cut-off using U.S. data. Finding such a discontinuity would suggest manipulation of birth timing.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our approach follows the economics of education literature looking at the impacts of delayed entry into primary school. This is an effective identification strategy if children's dates of birth are random near the school eligibility cut-off dates -as they have been shown to be in the literature (Dickert-Conlin & Elder 2010). This paper contributes to the literature by comparing the net benefits of starting school early for children from disadvantaged and advantaged backgrounds.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does early schooling narrow outcome gaps for advantaged and disadvantaged children?

Suziedelyte

Zhu

2015

Economics of Education Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Children to investigate if there is support for this hypothesis. The endogeneity of school starting age is addressed using the regression discontinuity design. We find that an early school start generally improves children's cognitive skills, which is even more pronounced for disadvantaged children. In contrast, an early school start tends to negatively affect children's non-cognitive skills with both advantaged and disadvantaged children affected in similar ways. Thus, our findings suggest that an earlier school entry may narrow the gaps in cognitive skills, whereas the gaps in non-cognitive skills are not affected by the school starting age. Permanent repository link

show abstract

“…3 Not all studies find a large response of birth timing to potential benefits. Evidence related to tax incentives in Japan is mixed (Kureishi and Wakabayashi 2008), and Dickert-Conlin and Elder (2010) find no evidence that US parents shift births forward to occur just before school eligibility cutoff dates, despite the reduced child care costs associated with sending a child to kindergarten a year earlier. There is also a related literature investigating the responsiveness of overall fertility to tax benefits.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%