Based on analyses of the effects of a wide range of educational
experiences in different countries and time periods, the recent
education literature suggests that high school interventions can affect
a wide range of outcomes, including earnings, family life, health and
happiness. In this paper we use a uniquely valuable dataset to document
how a single educational intervention in a particular UK setting can
affect all of these outcomes.
The intervention is assignment to the elite high school in the selective secondary education system that existed in the UK until the late 1960s. The setting is a Scottish school district in which secondary school assignments were a rigid function of the scores obtained on a series of tests taken at age eleven (the “11-plus”). The dataset, the “Aberdeen Children of the 1950s” contains a large sample of children that were born in the 1950s and attended secondary schools in this district in the 1960s. In 2001, aged around fifty, these children were traced and administered a wide-ranging
questionnaire. We exploit the sharpness of the 11-plus rules to
implement instrumental variables and regression discontinuity estimates
of the causal effects of attending an elite school on a selection of
these long-term outcomes.
Presented by:
Emilia Del Bono, ISER
Date & time:
February 25, 2009 1:00 pm - February 25, 2009 2:00 pm
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