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Working Paper

Redshirting, Compulsory Schooling Laws, and Educational Attainment

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A wide literature uses date of birth as an instrument to study the causal effects of educational attainment. This paper shows how parents delaying their children’s initial enrollment in kindergarten, a practice known as redshirting, can make estimates obtained through this identification framework all but impossible to interpret. A latent index model is used to illustrate how the monotonicity assumption in this framework is violated if redshirting decisions are made in a setting of essential heterogeneity. Empirical evidence is presented from the ECLS-K data set that favors this scenario; redshirting is common and heterogeneity in the treatment effect of educational attainment is likely a factor in parents’ redshirting decisions.
09.13.2010ISSN 2573-7953 WP 10-12DOI 10.26509/frbc-wp-201012
Keywords instrumental variable, local average treatment effect, average causal response, essential heterogeneity, independence, monotonicity, latent index model
JEL Classification Codes C01, C21, I21, J01

Working Papers of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment on research in progress. They may not have been subject to the formal editorial review accorded official Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland publications. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland or the Federal Reserve System.

Suggested Citation

Aliprantis, Dionissi. 2010. “Redshirting, Compulsory Schooling Laws, and Educational Attainment.” Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Working Paper No. 10-12. https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-201012