The distance between the birth date and the school entry cutoff has been repeatedly used as an exogenous instrument to examine the impact of several educational programmes. In this work, we analyse the validity of this instrument for the case of Argentina. Considering multiple waves of the Permanent Household Survey we detect the existence of…

A large literature documents that there are significant academic and non-academic differences between the youngest and oldest students in a school cohort. This paper investigates if being the youngest in a cohort has any impact on an individual's propensity to commit crime by utilizing a data set that contains over 4 million arrest records…

We analyze whether age relative to school classmates affects the likelihood of becoming famous. We measure such likelihood as the ratio of Wikipedia entries to births, by state and date of birth, among people born in 1969-1988 in the US. Using a reduced-form Regression Discontinuity Design, we find evidence that men born after the Kindergarten…

This paper estimates peer effects on children's school entry age, using a dataset on 4,165 children from rural northwestern China (Gansu province). Instrumental-variable estimation, exploiting variations in (older) peers' home-to-school distance to identify the effect of their school entry age, reveals that a one-year increase in (older) peers'…

There are sizable and pervasive academic achievement gaps between minority and non-minority students in the United States. Non-minority students -- particularly boys -- are more likely to enroll in school one year after they become eligible, a practice known as 'redshirting.' Consequently, non-minority students are on average more mature than…

Fixed cutoff dates regulating school entry create disadvantages for children who are young relative to their classmates. Early and late school enrollment, though, might mitigate these disadvantages. In this paper, we analyze in a first step which factors determine school entry, if entrance screenings allow for early and late enrollment. Second, we…

In this paper, we estimate the effect of pupil's relative age within the first grade of primary school on mathematics and reading test scores at age 15. The main objective is to evaluate the long-term causal effect of relative age in the first grades of primary school on pupil's test in 16 different countries. We use the national rule for…