The education laws of each country establish starting cutoff dates for compulsory education which could, potentially, affect students' academic achievement. Specifically, they could be detrimental for those students whose birthday is just before the school entry cutoff, as they will be the youngest in their classroom, while it could boost the…

We look at the effect of school starting age on standardized test scores using data covering all Grade 4 and Grade 8 students in Hungary. Instrumental variables estimates of the local average treatment effect suggest that children generally gain from starting school 1 year later, and the effects are much stronger in the case of students coming…