In countries with a school-entry cutoff date, individuals born right after the cutoff are almost 1 year older than individuals in the same school cohort born right before that date. Abundant research has documented that, as a result of that extra year of maturation and skill accumulation, older students in a cohort outperform their younger peers.…

Few elementary students on the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) are scoring at grade level or higher on the ACT Aspire reading assessment. To better understand factors associated with the reading proficiency of CNMI grade 3 students, stakeholders there asked the Regional Educational Laboratory Pacific to examine the demographic…

Few elementary students in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) are scoring at grade level or higher on the ACT Aspire reading assessment. To better understand factors associated with the reading proficiency of CNMI grade 3 students, stakeholders there asked the Regional Educational Laboratory Pacific to examine the demographic…

Few elementary students in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) are scoring at grade level or higher on the ACT Aspire reading assessment. This study examined data on students who enrolled in grade 3 in a CNMI public school from 2014/15 to 2018/19 to understand their grade 3 reading performance. The study used administrative…

Few elementary students on the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) are scoring at grade level or higher on the ACT Aspire reading assessment. To better understand factors associated with the reading proficiency of CNMI grade 3 students, stakeholders there asked the Regional Educational Laboratory Pacific to examine the demographic…

Using an unanticipated policy reform in Mexico that shifted 4 months the cutoff date for elementary school eligibility in 2006 and information on academic performance of 15-year-old students from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018 survey, who entered first grade in 2006, this paper estimates the effects of starting…

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a debated phenomenon and the link between schooling and the occurrence of ADHD diagnoses is worth critical scrutiny. This paper contributes to the academic debate by providing a literature review of the evidence on the influence of relative age effect (RAE) on being diagnosed with ADHD. Firstly,…

High school graduation rates are a central policy topic in the United States and have been shown to be stagnant for the past three decades. Using student-level administrative data from New York City Public Schools, I examine the impact of compulsory school attendance on high school graduation rates and grade attainment, focusing the analysis on…

In this study, we provide updated estimates of the private and social financial return on enrolling in a master's degree program in the United States. In addition to returns for all fields of study, we show estimated returns to enrolling in master's degree programs in business and education, specifically. We also conduct a sensitivity analysis to…

This study analyzes the effect of age-based retention on school achievement at different stages of education. I estimate an instrumental variable model, using the predicted probability of retention given month of birth as an instrument, while simultaneously accounting for the effect of month of birth on maturity at the time of testing. The…

We estimate the effects of relative age in kindergarten using data from an experiment where children of the same age were randomly assigned to different kindergarten classmates. We exploit the resulting experimental variation in relative age in conjunction with variation in expected kindergarten entry age based on birth date to account for…