By incorporating school entry age into a traditional decision-making model, this paper investigates the causal effect of delayed enrollment on educational attainment. The 1986 Compulsory Education Law provides an ideal natural experiment to study this issue, as primary school enrollment is arbitrarily determined by birth month only. Using the interaction term between birth month and policy shock as a proxy for age at enrollment, I document a negative relationship between age at school enrollment and high school attendance from both the 2005 Mini Census data and the 2010 Chinese Family Panel Study Adult Survey. The data suggests that delaying enrollment by one year decreases the probability of attending high school by 8.4 to 11.3 percentage points. Further explorations reveal that the o...[ Read more ]

By incorporating school entry age into a traditional decision-making model, this paper investigates the causal effect of delayed enrollment on educational attainment. The 1986 Compulsory Education Law provides an ideal natural experiment to study this issue, as primary school enrollment is arbitrarily determined by birth month only. Using the interaction term between birth month and policy shock as a proxy for age at enrollment, I document a negative relationship between age at school enrollment and high school attendance from both the 2005 Mini Census data and the 2010 Chinese Family Panel Study Adult Survey. The data suggests that delaying enrollment by one year decreases the probability of attending high school by 8.4 to 11.3 percentage points. Further explorations reveal that the observation that later-enrolled students complete less schooling is mainly due to the higher opportunity cost of further study.

Keywords: Compulsory Education Law, school entry age, birth month