In this paper we examine one of the fundamental beliefs underlying education policy - that the majority of teacher attrition is caused by the attractiveness of higher-paying alternative occupations. Using unique data from the state of Georgia that are created by merging administrative data from...

In an important and provocative paper, `Does Compulsory School Attendance Affect Schooling and Earnings?', Angrist and Krueger use quarter of birth as an instrument for educational attainment in wage equations. To support a causal interpretation of their estimates, they argue that compulsory...

In this paper we draw attention to two problems associated with the use of instrumental variables (IV) whose importance for empirical work has not been fully appreciated. First, using potential instruments that explain little of the variation in the: endogenous explanatory variables can lead to...