This paper presents evidence showing that individuals' season of birth is related to their educational attainment because of the combined effects of school start age policy and compulsory school attendance laws. In most school districts, individuals born in the beginning of the year start school...

Instrumental Variables (IV) estimates tend to be biased in the same direction as Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) in finite samples if the instruments are weak. To address this problem we propose a new IV estimator which we call Split Sample Instrumental Variables (SSIV). SSIV works as follows: we...

Two-stage-least-squares (2SLS) estimates are biased towards OLS estimates. This bias grows with the degree of over-identification and can generate highly misleading results. In this paper we propose two simple alternatives to 2SLS and limited-information-maximum-likelihood (LIML) estimators for...

Veterans of World War II are widely believed to earn more than nonveterans of the same age. Theoretical justifications for the World War II veteran premium include the subsidization of education and training, and preference for veterans in hiring. In this paper, we propose and test an...

Between 1970 and 1973 priority for military service was randomly assigned to draft-age men in a series of lotteries. Many men who were at risk of being drafted managed to avoid military service by enrolling in school and obtaining an educational deferment This paper uses the draft lottery as a...

The method of instrumental variables was first used in the 1920s to estimate supply and demand elasticities, and later used to correct for measurement error in single-equation models. Recently, instrumental variables have been widely used to reduce bias from omitted variables in estimates of...

This paper tests the hypothesis that compulsory school attendance laws, which typically require school attendance until a specified birthday, induce a relationship between the years of schooling and age at school entry. Variation in school start age created by children's date of birth provides a...

This paper uses the 2000 Census 1-in-6 sample to look at the long-term impact of Vietnam-era military service. Instrumental Variables estimates using draft-lottery instruments show post-service earnings losses close to zero in 2000, in contrast with earlier results showing substantial earnings...

High rates of attrition, delayed completion, and poor achievement are growing concerns at colleges and universities in North America. This paper reports on a randomized field experiment involving two strategies designed to improve these outcomes among first-year undergraduates at a large...

We develop a flexible semiparametric time series estimator that is then used to assess the causal effect of monetary policy interventions on macroeconomic aggregates. Our estimator captures the average causal response to discrete policy interventions in a macro-dynamic setting, without the need...