This paper presents evidence showing that individuals' season of birth is related to their educational attainment because of the combined effects of school start age policy and compulsory school attendance laws. In most school districts, individuals born in the beginning of the year start school...

Instrumental Variables (IV) estimates tend to be biased in the same direction as Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) in finite samples if the instruments are weak. To address this problem we propose a new IV estimator which we call Split Sample Instrumental Variables (SSIV). SSIV works as follows: we...