Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The long-term economic impact of children’s age at primary school entry is one of the concerns to policymakers, educators, and families. The timing of school enrollment may affect educational attainment and labor market outcomes at adulthood. In this paper, we explore these effects with a regression discontinuity design, employing the threshold date for primary school entrance set by the 1986 Compulsory Education Law of China as a source of exogenous variation in the timing of school entry. Using the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this paper documents weak compliance with the school entry legislation - individuals born just after the threshold date, are only 0.34 years older at school entry than their earlier born counterparts, whereas the predicted difference with perfect compliance is nearly one year. In addition, using both CFPS and China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), we find no significant effects on years of schooling with the full sample, but separate estimations by urbanicity document a positive effect of delayed school enrollment on educational attainment in rural areas. However, in either urban or rural areas, there is no evidence that the entrance age to primary school affects labor market outcomes at adulthood, such as the probability of employment or earnings.