Several previous studies have relied on religious affiliation and the proximity to Catholic schools as exogenous sources of variation for identifying the effect of Catholic schooling on a wide variety of outcomes. Using three separate approaches, we examine the validity of these instrumental...

In an important and provocative paper, `Does Compulsory School Attendance Affect Schooling and Earnings?', Angrist and Krueger use quarter of birth as an instrument for educational attainment in wage equations. To support a causal interpretation of their estimates, they argue that compulsory...

This paper employs conditional second moments to identify the impact of education in wage regressions where education is treated as endogenous. This approach avoids the use of instrumental variables in a setting where instruments are frequently not available. We employ this methodology to...

The recent literature on instrumental variables (IV) features models in which agents sort into treatment status on the basis of gains from treatment as well as on baseline-pretreatment levels. Components of the gains known to the agents and acted on by them may not be known by the observing...

Several previous studies have relied on religious affiliation and the proximity to Catholic schools as exogenous sources of variation for identifying the effect of Catholic schooling on a wide variety of outcomes. Using three separate approaches, we examine the validity of these instrumental...

This paper synthesizes economic insights from theoretical models of schooling choice based on individual benefits and econometric work interpreting instrumental variables estimates as weighted averages of individual-specific causal effects. Linkages are illustrated using college proximity to...